Seagate 320GB performance issues need help.

[HaakonXCI]

Hi, I have a Seagate 320GB SATA (3GB/s) HDD with the 3.AA firmware and the performance on it since I installed it last year in March has been horrible. Things have been occuring such as every time I start up my computer guaranteed it will take appoximately 2-6 minutes to fully "bootup" to where I can even load a single thing such as task manager to even show up. Also when I go to download updates or large files which can take a bit of time and I were to play any game at all the textures in the games usually take 8 seconds to fully load and come out of it's LOD state. When I go to click on My Computer the progress bar on the top there stops 1/5 of the way and pauses for 4 seconds and then will load afterwards and display how much space I have left and let's me click on things.

I use Window Vista Ultimate 64bit and I have 4GB of DDR2 800MHZ RAM along with an Intel Q6600 2.4ghz Quadcore CPU and an EVGA 9800GX2 (1GB VRAM) GPU. So the computer hardware isn't a bottleneck or anything but I'm wondering why this has been happening.

When I open up the Task Manager I see it usually always showing this

And as you can see the free memory there is odd how it shows little available yet the graph and bar there shows different readings. And the page file isnt really being used up either so if theres some kind of explanation for whats going on there as well maybe it's related I dont know.

I also used HDTune to see some stats with this to see if there was some issues and here's what came up

So you can take a look at that and tell me if there's something that looks wrong as well.


Please help me out with this because I have no other choice but to get a new HDD and/or RAM if this continues if there is no solution.

 

[Boxa786]

How long have you been using that hd for? Do you have a back up hd?

Looks like it could be a virus, trojan, spyware etc or general crap built up over time.

1. There's loads of tools out there to clean your hd, like crap cleaner and defragler, so you can try this if you want, but i would recommend you do option two. If you want to try clean it up, then first defrag, then antivirus scan, then crap cleaner, finally a reg cleaner (sorry cant remember a name atm). You could also try windows defender.

2. Back up files you need, and do a fresh install of windows, either what you have now or win 7 if you have a copy. This is the best you can do!

With either option, remember to update windows afterwards, all relevant patches and updates, same goes for latest drivers for your hardware.

If after the above its still extremely slow, test your ram using memtest boot cd, do all 4 first, then 1 stick at a time.

Only after all of the above, i suggest you rma the hd.

Hope this helps.

Ps. Overclock your cpu to atleast 3.0ghz, itl giv a big speed boost.

 

[jitpublisher]

The drive tests show pretty normal for what it is. Not a particulary fast drive, but normal readings for that drive if it is about half full. Drive perfromance tumbles as the drive fills up. By the way, how full is the drive?
If it's over 85%, you are indeed going to notice some slow downs, and lagging.
I concur with Boxa786. Try his suggestions.

 

[HaakonXCI]

Well it's been acting like this since day 1 so I don't know if it's spyware and all of that but I'll see what I can do. I use NOD32 for my antivirus and it has the realtime scanning and all of that for everything that goes on and I do some scans once in a while but it never picks up anything, I also use Spybot S&D. I don't plan on getting Windows 7 so I can't do anything there with that. I do have my HDD filled up constantly past 90% most of the time so that may bog things down a bit more I guess. I use Auslogistics software for my defragging and registry cleaning and I do that usually once every 4 days or so. I have all of the drivers updated for nForce which has all of the things that control these devices and also the BIOS is updated.

I'm going to overclock my CPU once I get some arctic silver 5 compound and maybe a new heatsink since I'm running on the stock fan/heatsink and I don't wanna touch it since it may have that crappy pink paste or whatever comes from the manufacturer and since my idle temps are usually always 125-155 F I don't think that would be a good idea right now.


But anyways yeah I mean I'll try one of those programs you mentioned but I have a feeling that this HDD is defective and that's probably the reason it's been slow since day 1. This is my first computer build that I've done and before this I had a cheap thing from 2001 but even that thing back then had a more responsive HDD than this one here which doesnt make sense other than it's defective or something. But how would I go about seeing if it really is defective in my situation here with it being so slow like this ever since I got it other than guessing?

 

[jitpublisher]

Over 90% most of the time, it's time for a bigger drive! That is likely part of the problem. And yes, the drive could just be bad. Not bad enough to keep it from working, but enough to keep it from working correctly. It has happened.

I have a Seagate SATAII 300 gig drive, that tests about the same as yours, and I swear sometimes it just stops working for several seconds, or even minutes at a time, and other times it just seems to crawl along.
I am about to toss out in the garbage, and go get something new. And it will NOT be another Seagate drive I will assure you of that!

 

[HaakonXCI]

Over 90% most of the time, it's time for a bigger drive! That is likely part of the problem. And yes, the drive could just be bad. Not bad enough to keep it from working, but enough to keep it from working correctly. It has happened.

I have a Seagate SATAII 300 gig drive, that tests about the same as yours, and I swear sometimes it just stops working for several seconds, or even minutes at a time, and other times it just seems to crawl along.
I am about to toss out in the garbage, and go get something new. And it will NOT be another Seagate drive I will assure you of that!

Yeah I mean I was looking at the Western Digital Black Caviar 1TB drive which will finally allow me to install all of my games here now that theyre makign them on these dual layer dvd's and stuff these 13GB installs arent making my life any easer sitting there literally for 45 minutes waiting for the progress bar to crawl along to finally get it to install.... then comes the updates which is another fun adventure. Uninstalling any application usually freezes and sits there at "Windows is collecting data required" or something for 20 minutes until it unfreezes and gives me the screen I want to progress to uninstall even the most basic programs that are only like 20MB. So yeah I dunno guess I'll have to wait and build up money to get a new HDD and maybe some mroe RAM and just eliminate page file as well while I'm at it.

edit: Also I am with you too, Seagate is off my list for a few years until there's some stable harddrives being made. maybe when SSD comes around in the 1TB range or something with the same prices we're seeing now for our normal drives, who knows.