Faster disk transfer rates on M1330

Hello,

I have a Dell M1330, new install of Win 7, 3gb RAM and Seagate Momentus 7200.2 120GB 7.2K SATA hard disk, and AVG 8.5 free version. I have DMA turned on for the disk drive in device manager. I was getting a 3.0 score on Windows Experience Index for hard disk transfer.

I want to maximize disk transfer speeds for Adobe Lightroom work. The hard disk seems to be running slower -- more lag than usual. I noticed this in the Vista install and it is also happening with 7.

I am experimenting with turned off "Enable write caching on the device". I had it turned on since I got the computer.

Should I uncheck "Write caching" because HDTune noted "minimum transfer rate" jumped from 14.1mb to 27.1mb/sec even though burst rate dropped from 100mb to 61mb/sec.

Should I also check the "turn off windows write-cache buffer flushing" on the hard drive?

I also heard AVG 8.5 free virus scanner is a hog --- does it slow down your system tremendously even when it isn't scanning.
Just looking for maximum speed settings for the disk drive.

Thanks.

 

For faster disk access and transfer rates I'd recommend upgrading your HDD. The tweaks you can make in Windows will be minuscule compared to a 320GB 7200rpm or 500GB 7200rpm HDD.

While your 120GB is 7200rpm, the bottleneck is in the platter size as its probably 2 60GB platters compared to the 2 160GB or 2 250GB platters in the newer drives which will make your read/write speeds MUCH faster.

I'd say you could easily double the speeds you have now with either of those 2 HDD's mentioned above. I'd recommend Seagate, go look at newegg.com as they are only ~$90

I'd also recommend picking up a 2nd 2GB stick of ram so you can take full advantage of the dual data rates, and have 4GB total. You can pick one up for less than $20 too.

 

Thanks for your reply tmaxxtim.

I was thinking of getting a 2nd stick of RAM but heard Windows only recognizes 3.2 GB of RAM unless you are using 64bit.

I know system resources and video card use up some memory-- will topping the RAM to 4gb speed things up?

How will bigger platters in the 320/500gb drives speed up hard disk performance?

Thanks

 

The larger platters require less distance the heads have to move, therefore increased seek and read/write times. If a 250GB platter is spinning it is able to move more data than a 80GB platter spinning as there is more data moving past the heads. Go google this and I'm sure you can find a better explanation.

At the least go lookup some benchmarks for the 320GB and 500GB 7200rpm drive, I think you will be surprised at the speeds over what you have now.

For RAM, even if you are using 32-bit (I've found no reason NOT to use 64-bit as everything has worked fine for me and lots of drivers are out now), with the 1GB stick in there, you are not utilizing the Double Data Rate (DDR) of the RAM. You need 2 sticks of the same size to utilize the DDR, so essentially you are running a single data rate in the ram. Even if Windows 32-bit was only able to see 3.25GB, it would be faster as you are able to use the double data rate transfer.

 

Isn't the windows experience index inaccurate in windows 7. That's what I read. I was also getting a 3.0 windows experience score with a Hitachi 7200 rpm 16mb cache 320gb hard drive, but dual booting and switching to vista shows the windows experience number at 4.8 for the same drive. I'm also running avg 8.5 and it is slow at scanning, but I don't feel any slowdown in my system while it's doing its thing in the background.