Disappointing Disk Performance

[gwai lo]

I've got a box on a fast line running torrents, I have a disk overloading problem, but looking at the disk statistics, the problems seems to be that the disk is not writing the data out of the cache. It seems to build it up until the cache is filled or the torrent finishes, then it begins to slowly write it to disk. Looking at the disk activity on another computer, when the torrent begins the disk automatically beings writing and the line has an upward trend. On the computer that's problematic, the write activity appears to spike, then drop to zero, then spike again, etc etc.

Due to the plots from disk activity, I'm somewhat inclined to believe this might be an issue with the hardware or drivers, as opposed to an issue with utorrent.

Information from device manager:
Drive:
Hitachi HTS541616J9SA00
Controller:
Intel 82801GB/GR/GH (ICH7 Family)

I've fired up processexplorer as well as the windows performance monitor to look for background tasks that might be using up extra disk I/Os but did not see anything out of the ordinary.

Will be happy to provide screenshots or extra information as I'm rather clueless in this area, so don't worry about telling me I've been doing it wrong the entire time.

 

[saedrin]

Have you run a disk benchmark utility?

 

[Crosshairs]

Ha, I am seeing the same problem...It just started about a week ago..I notice the cache fills up, and the torrent slows down cause the cache is full.......then slowly it will equalize and the disk will catch up.....
I thought I was having a disk problem as this started not too long after I swapped out my raptor and replaced it with a larger slower drive...
I can get upwards of 4 mb down sometimes, so I thought I might be choking the disk....
I use dedicated box..a Dell, Optiplex 755 with a Q6600 and 3gb of ram....they download to the Dell, then automatically transfer to my NAS....
now I wonder if it is a utorrent problem....

 

[gwai lo]

Have you run a disk benchmark utility?

Well, which one? I ran the HDTach in compatibility mode (Windows Server 2008) and it wouldn't finish the sequential read test. HDTune's read test runs fine, but I don't think the problem lies in the reading just based on what I'm seeing in the disk statistics. I can't run the write test because it's the OS drive. Any other suggestions? Chkdsk says everything is all good.

Ha, I am seeing the same problem...It just started about a week ago..I notice the cache fills up, and the torrent slows down cause the cache is full.......then slowly it will equalize and the disk will catch up.....
I thought I was having a disk problem as this started not too long after I swapped out my raptor and replaced it with a larger slower drive...
I can get upwards of 4 mb down sometimes, so I thought I might be choking the disk....
I use dedicated box..a Dell, Optiplex 755 with a Q6600 and 3gb of ram....they download to the Dell, then automatically transfer to my NAS....
now I wonder if it is a utorrent problem....

I don't think my disk ever equalizes because when I lower the cache amount to say...64MB, it just fills up and then goes disk overloaded. At that point, it seems like the OS decides to begin writing and does so at 1-2MB/s slowly emptying out the cache just so it can get filled right back up again. I tried throttling down speeds (it's on a 100/100 line fwiw) and same thing, cache gets filled and then the disk write activity spikes. Glad to know this isn't some anomaly isolated to me.

My explanations probably suck, so here are some pictures:
Box with problems:

Box without problems:

edit: Oh yeah, thanks for the responses so far guys.

 

[RedBill]

Have you tried copying the Utorrent config from the box without problems to the box with problems.

This would confirm whether it's Utorrent or the disks.

 

[gwai lo]

Yeah I've copied the diskio settings exactly. I've also tried various other diskio configurations from threads I found via google.

I've spent quite a few hours on this now =|

 

[gwai lo]

Okay I got a resolution to the problem. Talked to support after exhausting my own troubleshooting, I didn't have an SLA so i wanted to try to fix it on my own first.

Anyway, the techs took a look and tried a few things, what eventually worked was them reinstalling with AHCI enabled. I don't know why it wouldn't be enabled in the first place, but I guess it wasn't. Additionally, from my understanding, AHCI doesn't seem to address issues like this..but I'm not too good at this stuff anyway.

So yeah, for you guys who stumble upon this thread via google, that's how they fixed mine.