Performance screws up with windows 7 install.

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zbomb5610

Limp Gawd
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Apr 7, 2007
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This was my original thread on my raid being screwed up and what the hdtune graph looked like.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1615018

Turns out that it wasn't the hard drives at all. If I did a format on them they would perform fine and have no errors whatsoever.

When I install windows on the raid or even on a single hard drive this happens in hdtune. I even did this on 4 different hard drives (all WD 1TB blacks) with 2 different windows 7 install discs.

I never had this issue with my old 640gb black hard drives.

What can I do to get it to work right, seems like it is a windows issue more than anything as these drives would be great as storage but I need to put my OS on one of them.

What hardware stuff should I check out and what software issues could be related?

Any suggestions would be helpful, I have been messing with this issue for weeks now and I can't figure it out.
 
so i decided to try with windows vista on one of the hard drives and it has the same spikes in performance.

So pretty much windows installed on any hard drive is screwing up the performance of the drive.

Would a separate sata controller or something solve this issue?

Any recommendations on what to try?
 
Having your currently running Windows install on the drive means that it will be periodically accessed but the OS during testing, producing the variations in throughput that you describe. The drive will have other things to do besides running your benchmark, it's pretty much unavoidable. If you want to test the performance properly, you need to boot windows from a different drive and run your benchmark on a drive/array that isn't hosting the currently running OS.
 
Just to discard windows from accessing the drive while benching it, try "net stop wsearch" in a command prompt with admin rights, then bench it.
 
MrsOldMX said:
Just to discard windows from accessing the drive while benching it, try "net stop wsearch" in a command prompt with admin rights, then bench it.
Click to expand...

So I tried that command prompt and it still gets a few spikes compared to what it was getting, so it is performing a little better. What could that issue be related to and is there something I can disable that would remove these spikes? Or maybe I need to enable something?

Also I benchmarked drives with the OS installed but weren't the current hard drive running the OS and they were still having these spikes. Seems like even windows Vista and windows 7 are giving me these spikes. Seems worse for the drives that have windows 7 installed though.

Not sure what is going on.

Plus my old raid with my 2 640gb blacks didn't have any spikes even though it had the OS installed on it, the graph looked great and it performed well, just that one hard drive was throwing an error in the bios.
 
thefreeaccount said:
Have you tried increasing your stripe size to 512k/1MB already?
Click to expand...

I am currently running each drive separate, no raid setup at the current moment and I am seeing these spike drops in performance in hdtune. Just trying to figure that out at the moment.

Plus my bios only supports 128 for stripe size, haven't tried creating the raid array in windows yet, would that support a larger stripe size?
 
So I decided to try the raid again and this is what I get which is terrible, worse than using 1 drive by itself.

2hnbzhg.jpg
 
and this is with "net stop wsearch" which is a huge improvement and seems about normal to me compared to my old raid even though my old raid had higher burst speeds, not sure if those even really matter or not. So how do I get it to stay like this, will I have to type in "net stop wsearch" every time I boot up?

I also put my old raid which consisted of 2 640gb blacks for reference.

zmhbtu.jpg




5nkfna.jpg
 
Last edited:
Is this a fresh install? If so, your installation may simply be going through the initial indexing process, which should technically calm down when it's done. Check your indexing locations in control panel, is it indexing anything with a lot of files? Documents in particular tend to bog it down as it likes to index the contents of them depending on your settings.

To disable windows search permanently: start > run > services.msc
Scroll down to "Windows Search", double click, select "Disable" from the drop down list.
 
cre3d said:
Is this a fresh install? If so, your installation may simply be going through the initial indexing process, which should technically calm down when it's done. Check your indexing locations in control panel, is it indexing anything with a lot of files? Documents in particular tend to bog it down as it likes to index the contents of them depending on your settings.

To disable windows search permanently: start > run > services.msc
Scroll down to "Windows Search", double click, select "Disable" from the drop down list.
Click to expand...

yes, it is a fresh install. not sure how to check for indexing locations or what is being indexed though.

Is there any downside to disabling "wsearch". I think I may have just found what I need to do to finally have my system running and benchmarking like I want it to.

This sucked since I literally installed windows about 25 times since thursday evening on these 4 1tb drives.
 
One more question, is the partition aligned?

Check it under msinfo32 / components / storage / disks / Partition Starting Offset

It will be in bytes, so 1 048 576 bytes = 1Mb offset
 
MrsOldMX said:
One more question, is the partition aligned?

Check it under msinfo32 / components / storage / disks / Partition Starting Offset

It will be in bytes, so 1 048 576 bytes = 1Mb offset
Click to expand...

this is what mine reads and I appreciate the suggestions.

9t0h8g.jpg
 
OK, the first partition is aligned, so, the second one is too.

Whats your process list? Can you post a screenshot of your full task manager?
 
here is my task manager process list. I just installed avg like 5 min ago.

23mmtg4.jpg
fdaotz.jpg
 
Last edited:
Get rid of AVG, change it for Avast Home Edition or Mircosoft Security Essentials, and try benching it again?
 
MrsOldMX said:
Get rid of AVG, change it for Avast Home Edition or Mircosoft Security Essentials, and try benching it again?
Click to expand...

so here is the bench with avast (current) vs no antivirus vs avg installed. All with wsearch off.

The system still seems to hang at times and sometimes programs won't respond and lag. This is definitely not how my old raid setup was. Seems like performance is still not where I would like it.

rtkw11.jpg
 
Neb said:
To be fair he's showing all process, not just his current user processes.
Click to expand...

yeah, I was thinking the same thing when he showed his, since the bottom of his pic says 38 total processes.

I just figured the person that asked me to post it wanted me to post "all" processes.

Well it is the workweek now so I can't mess with my computer as much until the evenings so I will play with it more tonight and maybe try to install a game or two.

Last time I had my system up with the 2tb raid a few weeks ago I tried to install Witcher 2 and it kept hanging on me. Hopefully the system settles and starts to perform like I want it to.
 
Another question, why is it that the 2 640gb in raid had the burst dots (yellow dots) go all the way to 1280gb or so but the 2tb raid only has the burst dots go to like 50% or what would probably be around 1tb??
 
so I have been using the raid setup for a few days now. I definitely notice it is not working correctly.

For instance, sometimes when I am transferring files from the raid drives to my phone or an external hard drive, it will say "can't read from source disk" or whatever and I have to hit try again or it pauses for a min or so and then continues like my raid drives just stop responding.

Also when I play witcher2, i hit the escape button and it takes a good 45 sec to a minute before it goes to the menu screen when it used to do it instantly as soon as I pressed escape.

Does anyone have any advice on this?? both hard drives are error free through an extended test and I have no errors with the drives themselves.
 
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