Slow HDD in XP (But Win7 works fine)

Hi all,

I got a 500GB 2.5" Seagate Momentus 5400.6 5400RPM (ST9500325AS) a couple of weeks ago, I had previously had a Western Digital Scorpio 250GB drive that was working fine (until it crashed for the second time in 5 months).

I like to record HD ATSC using a USB Tuner w/TotalMedia 3 - with the Scorpio I would get ocassional skips but it was pretty good. However, with the 5400.6 it's choppy any time I try to record HD or enable Pause+Rewind HDTV mode. I have Hardware Acceleration on so it uses the ATI Graphics card to process the display and that's fine - it's only if I enable recording/PVR functions that I have problems (when it's recording the content direct to the hard drive for potential future recall).

I tested both Vista and the new Windows 7 beta - with Vista I got the same performance as XP. With Windows 7 though I could record no problems. There were a bunch of other problems with that OS - but not to do with this software or recording functionality. I was happy with that, but so many other things broke that i just had to go back to a stable OS. I had though Vista SP1 should be as fast as Win7, but no dice - it would also skip whenever recording was enabled.

I decided to see if it was something else, so I put a fresh install of XP on my old Seagate 7200.1 100GB drive and tested recording after installing every driver to see if there was some ASUS or other XP driver I was currently installing that was inhibiting performance. However, I had no issues whatsoever, the 7200.1 was smooth as anything with XP SP3 and all the other drivers loaded and working.

So right now I'm stumped as to what I can do - is there any way I can speed up the 5400.6 500 GB drive in XP so it can match the performance of the drive in Windows 7? I'm not asking it to do anything more than my old 250GB 5400 Scorpio could do with no problems.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I could try from here?

Thanks very much,
Cat

 

You could try enabling write caching on the hard disk. Check to make sure it is not fragmented too.

 

Thanks for your reply,

I did a check and Write Caching was enabled by default in XP. It's a SATA drive directly connected into my Laptop Port (I used it as a USB drive at one point, and while connected it actually slowed down the 7200.1's HDTV recordings until I shut down the system, disconnected it, then booted the system back up without it connected).

The drive is fully defragmented, has three partitions with the main one being 318 GB w/90 GB free. It's formatted as NTFS, running on UDMA mode, and Indexing Service Are Disabled.

Oddly, in XP the drive actually works faster when I run Disk Defragmenter - while it is actually running. Something may be running slowing down the drive and Disk Defrag stops it maybe..?

Thanks,
Cat

 

what do benchmarks like hdtune show?

 

Hey, I did a HDTune test yesterday - will run another in a minute and post the results. I compared them with this thread and it seemed similar but a little worse in most of the readings.

Maybe having the partition be 318 GB is too big for it? I did a test with the Windows 7 100 GB partition as my video storage location and it was just as slow - I did another test though with my 100 GB 7200.1 attached through USB 2.0 in my SATA enclosure and it recorded no problems at all. So the bandwidth of USB 2.0 is enough to record HD TV - it's just for some reason my drive is too slow in XP. Unfortunately I can't set my PVRTmp directory to anything but C: drive - but it seems no matter where I put it in on the 5400.6 something is slowing it down in XP, and not in Windows 7.

I've disabled a lot of services and startup programs, I even uninstalled Norton and Nero 9 to see if that would help, but nothing seems to have had any effect.

I read when installing SageTV to test it out that the best formatting is with 64kb Cluster/Block sizes - but I don't have that as an option in Partition Magic or in XP's own formatting wizard. I'm not sure what the 7200.1 is set for but my main drive is Windows XP install default.

I'll run the HD Tune bench now and post a screenshot when it's finished

Thanks very much,
Cat

 

HD Tune Report: