New build, SATA 6gb/s hard drive horrible read/write speeds

hungryduck

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 29, 2005
Messages
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So I just threw together my first 'new' build in a decade or so on a spur of the moment thing with a bunch of stuff I found on sale.

Intel core i5 3470 3.4ghz
MSI B75MA-P45 mATX mobo
8GB Corsair Ballistix
Toshiba 1TB 6gb/s hard drive
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

All the parts went together fine, and windows seemed to install OK.

Problem:
When installing drivers I noticed the speed of windows was abysmal - like it would take 10 minutes for it to boot and 20 minutes to install a driver. "Probably will work itself out after all the chipset/video drivers are in!" is what I thought. However, all the drivers are in now, and it's still going very, very slow.

I downloaded a hard drive benchmark utility to find that I'm averaging 1.5mb/s read speeds and 50mb/s write speeds on the hard drive, which seems way too slow, and the performance of the machine is god awful. Takes 1 to 2 minutes for folders to open, and 30 seconds to open the control panel or start menu. Once things open it's smooth, so I feel like this is a HD issue.

Solutions I've tried:
Tried reinstalling the intel chipset drivers. No result.
Tried moving the hard drive from the 6gb/s SATA port to another SATA port. No result.

Any thoughts?
 
Try another HDD.

Put the same HDD in another system.

Use a bootable utility like SeaTools to check the HDD.

Is the motherboard BIOS up to date?
 
You forgot to buy the most important component, the SSD.
 
Sounds like it might be a bad HD to me. I'd try downloading the manufacturer's diagnostic utility & if that doesn't turn anything up maybe look for a utility that can check the smart status of the drive (Linux generaly includes smartctl, so I just use that).
 
You forgot to buy the most important component, the SSD.

Hah, indeed.

Well the toshiba drive failed later in the day. Wouldn't book, clicks of death. Rubbish.

I took the drive back and bought an SSD instead. Much happier. :)
 
Hah, indeed.

Well the toshiba drive failed later in the day. Wouldn't book, clicks of death. Rubbish.

I took the drive back and bought an SSD instead. Much happier. :)

The quality control at the manufacturing facility that Toshiba acquired from HGST has gone down the crapper...

Ever since WD acquired most of the assets of HGST, the HGST-branded hard drives have been manufactured in WD's existing facilities, using a mixture of old-generation (500 GB/platter) and newer-generation (1TB/platter) disk layouts (the latter likely developed by WD itself, not inherited from HGST).

And I upgraded to an SSD in my main system almost a year ago. My secondary system is currently running a 500GB WD Caviar Blue SATA 3.0 Gbps hard drive, and it took twice as long to fully boot into Windows compared to my SSD-equipped main rig (nearly two minutes, compared to the less than one minute that my SSD-equipped main rig has been able to do despite the two systems having CPUs that perform nearly equal to one another). That is largely due to the Caviar Blue's relatively slow random access speeds (over 15 ms, compared to the less than 1 ms that the SSD achieves).
 
You forgot to buy the most important component, the SSD.

Not necessarily. The OP said he largely decided to build this rig because he was able to get the parts on a good sale and I noticed he picked out a 1TB hard drive. Do you have any idea how much a 1TB SSD would cost him? Even on sale it would be a crap ton of money. Plus, even a 10 year old hard drive like the one he supposedly had in his old build would have offered way way way more than 1.5MB per second transfer speed so it's not so much of an issue of not having a SSD, but having a bunk hard drive.
 
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