G50V hard drive performance tip

I've been working diligently to resolve intermittent stutter when playing WoW on my G50V-A2. My investigation led me to inspect the sata jumper settings on the two Seagate Momentus 7200.2 hard drives. Lo and behold they were set to half-speed! I removed the jumpers to enable full 3.0 Gb/sec speed. Wow what a difference!!!

 

And what is the difference?

 

Oh sorry, assumed it would be obvious. Stutter in WoW is gone and hard disk performance in general is WAY better, loading speed, etc

 

My unit came with Western Digital Drives, and has no issues from the start. You may want to specify the model (X1, A1, B1) so people know.

I can share a performance tip for the A1 also tho.

The WD drives have a feature called AAM, its acoustic management. Basically it keeps the drives super silent at the default setting of 128, but you can raise it all the way to 256 I think are the numbers. At the highest setting your access time drops by .3ms and that does mean something when it comes to random access time.

From my review:


I had it stock on the first drive and turned up to max on the second drive.

That very program can change it HD Tune Pro, however due to how the HDD's are connected only one of them can be changed. To change both you would have to swap them around or hook it up externally.

 

I said G50V-A2.

 

Mario, do you mind telling me how removed the SATA jumpers? I have the A2 as well. And if you don't mind, what exactly does this do, why are the jumpers in place?

 

Oh I meant the thread title but its ok. I added the A1 tip

 

x2

Thanks

 

I'm interested in this as well.

 

Here's a link to the owner's manual for the drives. Page 20 explains the jumper settings. http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/notebook/momentus/7200.2/100451238d.pdf

From the factory, Asus has them in compatibility mode which is for motherboards that don't support 3.0 Gb/sec transfer speed. Problem is the G50V does support it. To enable all you do is remove the jumper.

If you google Sata I vs. Sata II you'll find many articles, some of which indicate there is no real-world difference between the two. Others, however, have found marked improvement in specific types disk access (small writes for example). From my own personal experience with WoW it most definitely makes a difference. Since graphics performance in WoW is so closely tied to hard disk performance I would surmise it is using the types of disk access specifically enhanced by Sata II

 

So you actually have to remove the hard drive and remove the jumper settings?

 

Yes exactly.

 

Taking the harddrives out and putting them back in easy? also is there anything else you have to do or when you plug them back in things will run normally?

 

Ah I don't wanna be taking anything out and putting it back in...I'm too scared to mess with a $1800 system lol

Any tips for doing this without screwing anything up?

 

Its easy but just dont do it

Maybe his was just a fluke, as not everybody else has had the issues and even with 1.5gbps aka SATAI speed it would not bottleneck the hard drive so I dont even think that was the real issue.

The drive runs at like what 80mb/s max? your interface is 1.5 GIGAbits/s not even desktop hard drives like raptors can fully use a SATA I interface.

 

I beg to differ. The ONLY thing I changed was removing those jumpers and the stuttering went away. It for sure was the issue. As I indicated, if you'll search around you will find that with certain types of disk access Sata II makes a significant difference in performance.

 

Removing the HDD is not a difficult task. You can try opening it up, and see if you're up to it. If you feel you're not you can interrupt at any time and put things back in. But it's really not difficult... just remove the bay door, a couple of screws and then you can pull it out.

Make sure the notebook is not plugged in and also remove the battery, before doing this.

 

So I remove all the jumpers present with tweezers or something right?

It is so aggravating to know that my notebook is 20 minutes away from my house but I have to wait till Monday to get it but I am hoping I can go pick it up tonight. Anyone know if UPS tracking page is updated in real time?

 

Don't remove all the jumpers, check the HDD labels for a description of the jumper configurations. Then, set the jumpers in the correct config for SATA-II.

 

do you need to do anything after (software wise) to get the computer running or does changing the settings on the hd not have an effect?

 

The link that Mario posted on the first page shows that there is 2 jumpers in place which limits it to 1.5 gb/s. It shows that with no jumpers in place it runs at 3.0 gb/s so I figure you remove both of them.

 

Why would they do this? I'm having a hard time understanding the point of it. Does it make it more stable or cooler?

 

Sure, if the jumpers need to be removed to enable the functionality, then they should be removed. I only meant one should read the instructions, not go ahead and remove jumpers.

As to why, I think it's difficult to tell. Either they didn't fully test it and they don't want to take responsibility, or it may even be as dumb as them not taking the time to change the jumpers from their default factory settings (either at the ASUS plant, or at the HDD manufacturing plant).

 

Correct. You simply remove the jumper from each drive. Sata II is automatically enabled. Nothing has to be done in BIOS or Windows.

 

Does this affect the A1s as well?
When I play WoW I get random 1-2 second pauses every now and then.