Complete slowdowns during hard drive transfers..

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maxiedaniels

Gawd
Joined
May 25, 2005
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I've had a weird problem for a few years now that I haven't figured out. Whenever I am writing large files to my drive on my PC (Win8.1), my system will slowdown SO much. Explorer windows are extremely slow, games stutter, Chrome will barely respond.
The strange thing at this point is that I have actually changed out the motherboard AND hard drive in this system. The hard drive I've replaced twice actually I think.
What else would be causing this issue? I've checked to make sure the motherboard is AHCI mode with my drive, that hasn't made a noticable difference. I ran memtest overnight, no errors.

A specific example of my issue is that I was just copying a 14gb folder from an external to my primary drive, and while that was transferring (at about 65MB/s), I tried to view my primary drive's root directory in explorer. It just kept loading, explorer view blank, until the 14gb transfer was done, at which point explorer loaded the root directory instantly. Is that normal??
 
If you're doing it to your OS drive, I'm unsurprised.
You basically have the copy/move process competing for I/O with the rest of your OS functions.
This is why I normally advocate separate OS and App/Storage drives.
 
I've changed the SATA cable multiple times now, yes.

@Chas - I understand a little bit of slowdown but is this really normal?? I don't recall ever having this issue before, and I never experience this on my Mac systems...
 
USB 2.0?

No it's not normal, but it could be a USB controller issue. You're saturating it pretty heavily. The HDD should be able to handle a good bit more than 65MB/sec depending on the drive. Something in the 90 - 110MB/sec range.

Are they a lot of small files you're transferring? That could kill a drives performance heavily when transferring multiple small files like that.
 
Sata. Hmm. I get that Im saturating the drive but since when does that mean not being able list things on the drive, load a website, etc? I would think those actions wouldn't require much transfer rate at all, I would think RAM handles most of that?
 
Yep across OS installations.... I've switched drives three times now (just switched again for capacity reasons)... Fresh install.
 
maxiedaniels said:
Sata. Hmm. I get that Im saturating the drive but since when does that mean not being able list things on the drive, load a website, etc? I would think those actions wouldn't require much transfer rate at all, I would think RAM handles most of that?
Click to expand...

So the external hard drive is connected via SATA?

What kind of drives do you keep buying?
 
Sorry, I misunderstood your question. The example of the external drive transfer to my internal drive was just a small example - this issue is affecting performance system wide with or without an external involved.

My internal drive is SATA. My external drive I mentioned in that example was USB3.
 
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