Bad performance with WD5000AACS

[spiza007]

Hey fellas.

I bought a green power disk from WD about a year ago (WD5000AACS), and so far it is performing reasonably well, except in World of Warcraft.

When I move around in places with a high amount of players/monsters/details in general, I will hear the harddisk grinding away like crazy, and the FPS will drop to near zero, possibly even freezing up completely for a little while, and the game will be unplayable untill the harddisk picks up again.

In those situations my CPU load is around 40-80%, memory never used up, and my GFX is not exactly overworked either, but the harddisk is peaking at 9-10 MB/sec when locking up.

Im running Vista 32 ultimate, with windows and the game on the same harddrive but different partitions. I've also got a 1TB version of the same drive, which I use for the heavy storage type of stuff, but no games or apps.

System specs:
C2D E8400
ATI HD4850
2x2gb of CORSAIR XMS2
GA-EP35-DS3R
WD5000AACS and WD10EACS

Now my friend has a very similar system, except he has slightly worse CPU and some Seagate harddisk, but his game is running much, much better than mine.

So can anyone explain why this is happening? Did i setup something wrong, or is the harddrive simply not fast enough?

 

[spiza007]

EDIT: I just talked to my cousin who runs the same system I do, and he has no trouble either, so obviously the harddisk is fast enough.

Any help on help I go about troubleshooting this?

 

[sub mesa]

You might have a PIO issue or some serious background I/O. Please post a HDTune benchmark screenshot to diagnose this, please let it finish so don't press stop too soon.

After you posted the screenshot, i should be able to instantly tell if you are running in PIO mode or not. PIO mode can be caused by bad cabling, but its a very common issue that lowers performance drastically and your whole PC becomes slow with even the mouse lagging at times, which is unusual.

 

[spiza007]

I uploaded the picture to here, I hope this was what you asked me for:

http://www.fluii.dk/pic.asp?id=1969

I had my friend with the same harddrive run the same test to see if there was any difference, and while overall the curve took the same dive, his was a much smoother and never went below about 30 MB/sec, if that tells you anything.

Thanks

 

[sub mesa]

There is nothing wrong with your harddrive, but during testing its visible that background I/O is being done. This means that programs run on the background that consult the disk. If they do this during your gaming, and the game needs some textures from the disk; it will be very slow.

To fix this:

1) increase your RAM capacity, so once everything is loaded it won't have to access the disk again
2) clean up your pc to run as little applications in the background as possible, especially virusscanners and other bloated, intrusive and resource-hungry applications
3) defragment your harddrive, make sure it never exceeds 80% of the used capacity or partition in a smart way
4) separate a system disk from a data disk

By the way, a WD Green drive is not the ideal choice for a system disk. Its the ideal choice to store large files like movies, music, ISOs etc; a great 'download drive'. But its less suitable to act as system disk, running both Windows and all your applications.

Somehow i think your PC is very unclean, with lots of programs running in the background. Try to see if you can clean this up or maybe even reinstall. If possible, buying another HDD or SSD to act as system drive may also improve your experience.

 

[sub mesa]

By the way, your RAM is being used; though Windows may see some memory is free that's a lie; its being used as file cache. If you had 16GB+ memory (the size of all WoW data files) everything once loaded will fit in RAM and world of warcraft won't need to access your harddrive during gaming or even switching zones.

So more memory helps, not when you first launch world of warcraft but everything that's loaded won't be needed again because its cached in the RAM. Likely in your case the PC is so contaminated with running processes and resource usage there is too few RAM left to properly cache your World of Warcraft data files.

 

[spiza007]

Thanks for you answer.

If there any way I can monitor exactly what i loaded in my RAM, so that I can easily identify whatever is causing this.

And running windows in a 32-bit version, won't I be unable to access any more RAM anyway?

 

[sub mesa]

Press control-alt-del to launch Task Manager, and sort the processes on RAM usage. Generally, if you see a scroll bar your PC is crawling with processes and you should clean up or reinstall.

Windows gets contaminated fairly quickly, and reinstalling may be quicker than cleaning it up. But i'm no windows expert; still its safe to say your HDD is not the problem its a software issue.

And yeah 32-bit OS needs PAE to exceed 2GB. Generally you should opt for 64-bit these days, especially if you go over 4GB RAM.

Note that i'm playing WoW very fine on Ubuntu Linux (64-bit) using Wine. Its slow in dalaran, but thats CPU-bottlenecked and generally it drops to 20fps not lower. It does use up all my RAM (8GB) tho, as file cache.

 

[spiza007]

I'm actually running a fairly new partition of windows

This is my startup list: http://www.fluii.dk/pic.asp?id=1971

Could something be wrong with my RAM? :O

 

[sub mesa]

What about the task manager's process list?

If it looks something like this, you may have too many processes running:

Also, are you sure Windows SuperFetch/defrag and all other background stuff is disabled? Try to minimize the memory usage when you're gaming; you don't really need all those background programs while gaming do you?

Nothing wrong with your RAM, except the limited size of RAM. Ideally you want every application you use to fix in RAM; but WoW is like 16GB so that's not possible; so it has to load from disk alot. Make sure enough memory is free.

Maybe you can startup WoW and go to Dalaran and give me output of your windows process list? Again, i'm no windows expert so i'll try to give you some meaningful advice but maybe some other people can help you better than me.