Horrible hard drive performance in windows 7 64 bit, help!

[MacrosTheBlack]

Hi guys,

I've just installed windows 7, 64 bit on my PC running next to a windows XP installation and am in the process of optimising performance....

however, I have run into an issue that I can't seem fix, namely, the disk performance tests are showing attrocious results, compare:

Windows XP :

Disk - Sequential Read: 88.3
Disk - Sequential Write: 86.4
Disk - Random Seek + RW: 2.6

Windows 7 64 bit:

Disk - Sequential Read: 44.7
Disk - Sequential Write: 43.3
Disk - Random Seek + RW: 2.2


obviously, the disks being half as slow running on windows 7 as compared to windows XP is seriously impacting the real world performance of my rig!

Any clue as to what I can to to resolve this? I've already ruled out the obvious stuff and have checked that my chipset drivers are properly installed and updated!

my config:

ASUS M4N78 pro MOBO
AMD Phenom X4 920
4GB DDR 667 RAM
WD10EACS-65D6B0 HDD

[wonderwrench]

So this is a dual boot, XP/W7? Are both OS's on the same physical drive?
XP on the first partition and W7 on the second? What partition sizes are you using? How did you partition the drive? Magnetic drives are read from the outer edge to the inner edge so the first partition will be faster than the ones that follow. Try changing the drive under test to the C partition and see if the results improve.

I just did some testing on my WD 500 gig Blue drive. Partitions are 150 gigs and 315 gigs. The second partition is 22% slower than the first. Your 1 TB Green drive may suffer more performance loss because its a 5400 rpm drive.



Bill

[MacrosTheBlack]

I think that's quite likely to be the issue. I actually have 2 of these drives, and I used the second HDD to put the new OS on... however, because I didn't want to wait 4 hours of re-partitioning while moving 800GB worth of data I decided to be lazy and put the new partition (the one I put win7 on) at the END of the disk.....

This has apparantly come back to bite me in the ass, as somehow I failed to remember the logic of worse performance at the end of a disk.... oops :$

Anyway, I AM now repartitioning, and minitool partition is diligently busy moving those 800GB I was mentioning before :P Gl to me

on a sidenote, I think I'll get a SSD tomorrow, because they look very sexy to load an OS onto!

[wonderwrench]

Yes it now makes sense. An SSD will make a huge difference in system performance. I'm running a Intel X25-M G2 80 gig in my main rig and I can hardly use other PC's because they are so slow. I can safely say I will never build a new PC without using a SSD for the boot drive.

When you get a SSD do a clean install with AHCI enabled in the bios. First format the drive with a single partition from within windows 7. This will keep the correct sector offset and eliminated the 100 meg diagnostic partition Windows 7 places on the drive if you format from the install DVD. Once on your desktop disable windows defrag schedule and drive indexing from within the drives properties. There are many more tweaks that can be done but the above is the bare minimum. You can google for more info if you like.

BTW do not install the Nvidia storage controller driver as it does not support TRIM. The windows built in driver should sport TRIM by default.

[MacrosTheBlack]

Hi again,

I went out this morning and got a SSD and it's lightning freaking fast! Especially as I was booting from a "green" drive before. I've divided it up into 2 partitions, 1 for my win7 install and the second to load my games and apps off, so they profit from the added performance as well.

I found an interesting article on the corsair website last night, so I'm busy tweaking as we speak.... by the way, the Nvidia storage driver actually made me run into the BSOD, so I had to restore and go in again.....

thanks for the help so far

[wonderwrench]

Hi again,

I went out this morning and got a SSD and it's lightning freaking fast! Especially as I was booting from a "green" drive before. I've divided it up into 2 partitions, 1 for my win7 install and the second to load my games and apps off, so they profit from the added performance as well.

I found an interesting article on the corsair website last night, so I'm busy tweaking as we speak.... by the way, the Nvidia storage driver actually made me run into the BSOD, so I had to restore and go in again.....

thanks for the help so far

What SSD did you get? I hope you got the sector offset correct. You can check it using AS SSD bench utility. If the alignment is wrong, not aligned on the 4k boundaries performance and drive life will be greatly reduced. Make sure you check both partitions. Note if you use a disk imaging program for backups most will break the offset when restoring a single partition on a drive with more than one partition. The easy way around the problem is to always restore the complete drive or use a single partition. Some imaging programs may have fixed this problem in their latest versions. I use TrueImage and they still do not have the problem fixed in TI 2011.

[MacrosTheBlack]

I got the corsair F120 as it came up well in testing (both here and on storagereview)....

I downloaded the tool, but I can't seem to find where the offset is hidden? And if it IS fubar'd, how do I fix it?

[wonderwrench]

I got the corsair F120 as it came up well in testing (both here and on storagereview)....

I downloaded the tool, but I can't seem to find where the offset is hidden? And if it IS fubar'd, how do I fix it?

That should be a good choice. See screen shot.

[MacrosTheBlack]

yep found it and fixed it for my first partition, but I can't figure out how to do this for the second partition on the same drive, as the diskpar tool doesn't seem to be able to make a second partition on the same drive?

Any chance you can explain to me how to fix the alignment on my second partition? it does seem to affect the performance of my SSD quite severely!

[wonderwrench]

yep found it and fixed it for my first partition, but I can't figure out how to do this for the second partition on the same drive, as the diskpar tool doesn't seem to be able to make a second partition on the same drive?

Any chance you can explain to me how to fix the alignment on my second partition? it does seem to affect the performance of my SSD quite severely!

Paragon was giving away an alignment tool that should do the trick though I never tested it. I downloaded it but never had a need for it. I think they charge for it now. There are other ways to get the job done but I'm no expert on doing so. One way would be using a manual disk editor. To scary for me!

[wonderwrench]

Anything new on this?

Bill

[MacrosTheBlack]

The partition tool didn't do the trick, infact, it seems to have done my boot sector in a bit, slowing startup a fair bit but not actually doing the work Still trying to find a way to get the sector alignment of my second partition right, but at least my primary partition is alright now.

The speed on the primary partition is immense now by the way, the rating for the disk on the 64 bit passmark is 2000!!!!!

[wonderwrench]

Since you never need to defrag an SSD it would be much easier to run a single partition and install all programs to C:\. The only down side would be if you make image backups of the drive the images would be much larger.

I have never tested game load performance differences between magnetic and SSD drives myself but from what I have gathered online in most cases SSD's make little difference, depends on the game though. Reason being most game files are large and highly compressed. The CPU and the file extraction engine the game uses has a larger affect on game load times.

I run a single partition on my 80 gig SSD and install everything excluding games to it. I use TrueImage 2010 and my latest OS image is about 6 gigs.

Bill