Performance problems with HDD in system

[dderidex]

I'm seeing some performance problems with a Western Digital 1.5tb Caviar 'Black' drive I have in my system - a WD1501FASS.

See below:

I'm thinking that the latency spikes (highlighted) would not GENERALLY be a problem, as I've seen them in browsing around other HD Tune results on the web. However, I am experiencing a problem in games - when loading a new audio sample for the first time of this drive, I can see the HDD LED flicker, and the game pauses/stutters a moment. It's kind annoying, as it can happen in the middle of a shooter when some weapon is fired for the first time or explosion effect played for the first time...IE., just at the wrong moment for a stutter!

As I have a bunch of SSDs in the system, Windows has 'helpfully' disabled superfetch/prefetch/etc on all my drives. As a best guess, I'd assume that such capabilities would have 'smoothed over' the performance problem noted above...which is why, I suspect, most people don't see these?

Are there any options for how to resolve this other than going with a pure-SSD or pure-spinner set of disks? As I have about 300gb of game data, but only a tiny fraction used regularly at any given time, I was thinking that maybe swapping the drive out for Momentus XT might help address this? That should get me SSD-like access time for frequently used files, and it's really access time where I'm suffering (throughput seems fine).

Anyone else using a mix of drives (SSD system disks, spinning platter data/game drives) and seeing similar results?

 

[drescherjm]

I was thinking that maybe swapping the drive out for Momentus XT might help address this?

In my opinion. No the slower (than your current drive) Momentus XT will not help or at least I have yet to see when the 4GB cache is helping me at work.

That should get me SSD-like access time for frequently used file

In theory you should get USB stick random performance for the 4GB of files that are in the cache. In reality I do not see this happening with any of my 4 Momentus XT drives I have at work.

 

[drescherjm]

BTW, did you look at the Health tab on hdtune? Does it indicate any problems?

 

[dderidex]

BTW, did you look at the Health tab on hdtune? Does it indicate any problems?

No, no problems there. And, as noted, in looking at Google images for HD Tune on that particular WD drive number, those results seem well in line with what everyone else is getting.

 

[dderidex]

In my opinion. No the slower (than your current drive) Momentus XT will not help or at least I have yet to see when the 4GB cache is helping me at work.

Not sure what you mean by 'slower than my current drive', though.

Anand's testing of the 500gb Momentus XT showed it neck-and-neck with a Velociraptor. Importantly, beating it soundly in gaming. And a Velociraptor is *considerably* faster than my current drive. So...?

I had briefly considered putting a Velociraptor in this slot in my system, but my concern is that the loss of the prefetch/superfetch just means I'm going to be seeing less-than-ideal latency performance on all spinning-platter drives, period.

 

[drescherjm]

Not sure what you mean by 'slower than my current drive', though.

For all reads that are not in the 4GB cache (and for all writes) it will be considerably slower than your current drive.

 

[dderidex]

For all reads that are not in the 4GB cache (and for all writes) it will be considerably slower than your current drive.

Not sure I follow why, though. Current drive is 7200rpm, this drive is 7200rpm. Current drive has 32mb cache, this drive has 32mb cache. Current drive is SATA2 3.0gb/s with NCQ, this drive is SATA2 3.0gb/s with NCQ. Current drive uses 500gb platters at 3.5" size, this drive uses 250gb platters at 2.5" size...so, yes, data density is a bit lower (very slightly - assuming the platter took up the whole drive size, you are talking about 51.97gb per square inch vs 50.93gb per square inch)...but not a HUGE amount.

I'm not really seeing where there would be a 'considerably slower' performance impact?

 

[dderidex]

Decided to pick up a Seagate Momentus XT, then.

First impressions are good. With just an hour or so using it, so far, I do still see the occasional latency hit...but it's much, much less bed than the older drive. And I should still be in the 'learning' phase, when it's trying to decide what to put in the cache or not. Already seemed like, as I was signing off for the night, the last few matches had loaded *considerably* faster.

 

[Aesma]

So, you have "a bunch" of SSDs in your system, but somehow, your games are on a hard drive ?

Is your OS on a SSD ?

 

[dderidex]

So, you have "a bunch" of SSDs in your system, but somehow, your games are on a hard drive ?

Is your OS on a SSD ?

OS is on an SSD, yes. As to why the games are on a HDD - well, I've got 200gb in games! I don't have that much space on ALL the SSDs in my system, combined, so...

 

[Aesma]

But did you try to compare the same game on HDD and SSD and realized the HDD was abnormally slow ?

 

[dderidex]

But did you try to compare the same game on HDD and SSD and realized the HDD was abnormally slow ?

Not sure I follow - why would I compare a game on an HDD to an SSD? Obviously, the SSD will be faster.

 

[Aesma]

You describe some sort of problem with the HDD, not just its natural "slowness", so I was wondering if you had made such comparison (you could also have used another HDD).