Slow disk I/O-normal?

I have the 250 gb 7200 rpm drive in my e6420 and one of the reasons for going with the faster drive again was the speed.

In most day to day use, the machine feels great, its just that when programs load or other things happen that creates large amounts of disk i/o (as measured by the nearly steady hdd light) the computer gets a tad stuttery sometimes to the point of the mouse pointer not responding for a few seconds until the hdd activity slows down. i should note that in many instances, the light can be steady on but no ill effects occur

I've chalked it up to me just being used to my old machine and I'm overly paranoid, but it just doesn't feel right for a machine with such a fast hdd, 4 gb of ram and a i5 to slow like that imo.

I don't know if its just a driver installation issue as I've had trouble installing them in the right order. I followed dell's checksheet when I clean installed but apparently either I missed something or installed out of order as my lcd brightness and OSD level don't match and I can turn off the backlight.

Anyone else experience this at all? Its somewhat annoying how picky these systems are with driver installation order, and dell's pdf is somewhat poorly laid out.

 

I've never had an issue installing outside of Dell's driver order, as long as all drivers are installed.

Slow disk can be the result of a failing drive? Have you run Dell Diagnostics on it? Run health scan in HD Tune?

 

I haven't run Dell Diagnostics on it, I might now just to see if anything pops up

 

Ran dell diagnostics in both standard and extended test modes. This machine came up clean as a whistle.

I'll try HDTune next. The issue isn't debilitating but I'm curious as to why it happens at all because it makes the machine seem slower psycologically.

I ran a benchmark in HDTune with default settings for a minute or so and i was able to move the mouse around w/out incident. I also ran all the "extra" tests, the "random access" test and mouse performance was good. I wonder if I could be maxing out my RAM, chrome does eat up a lot with many tabs open (I end up around 75-85% of RAM used...I know that in Vista and up, this isn't a bad thing though)..that wouldn't explain why i get the stutter shortly after logging on though..or would it if the memory bandwidth is being overwhelmed somehow?

I'm running the health scan now (I assume it's the "error scan" tab) and will view the results in the AM.

 

Well there's also the fact, if you are used to an SSD, all mechanical drives just seem uber slow. Have you tried a fresh install? Perhaps something didn't get aligned right?

 

I've never used a SSD, but my D630 has a 120 GB 7200 RPM drive, so maybe it feels faster because it's smaller *shrugs*

I'll try reinstalling windows after I get it back from the depot.