P-7805u poor disk performance

3 weeks ago picked one of these up on special from Best Buy, very psyched. With the money I saved (from my original budget), went out and bought a 60GB OCZ Vertex SSD. While that is another story, it took a while to get it installed as the OS drive (short version, update Gateway bios, flash drive, install).

So with only the SSD as the OS drive, this thing is a beast.

Placing the WS Scorpio as the secondary drive is causing major performance problems.

At first I thought it was the partition. I went into Diskpart to drop the 10GB restore partition, then used Diskpart to create a new active partition for the whole drive. Went into Disk Manager to format, took hours! Then each reboot took forever, the computer would essentially hang any time it would read the D: drive.

So I dropped and rebuilt the partition from Disk Manager and did a quick format. Things seemed to be working just fine now, so I started to load software and moved my Users folder to the D: drive.

And now we are back to siezureville. For the past 10 minutes my install of 7zip 64-bit has been hanging, since I wanted to install that to D: I can surf and do other things, as long as it doesn't touch the D: drive.

After reading the boards, did the disk power setting, though the problem starts anytime I try to read the D: drive (via explorer, saving a file there, you name it).

Another thing I noticed is in the bios, the WD now shows up as an unbootable device. Now that is true, since the bootstrap sectors are gone and maybe that is what the bios is reading, but it is a change from from before when things were working.

It may be possible that the drive is bad, however prior to the SSD install it did just fine for nearly two weeks.

Anyone have any ideas for me to try???

Thanks in advance,

Greg

 

You might want to get HDTune (in my signature) and run a benchmark on your D drive. Also, check out the other information in HDTune to see if there's anything abnormal in the SMART data.

 

Here are the screen shots from HD tune benchmarking. No faults detected on either drive.

 

Google for settings. There are some setting in Vista that make a big difference (I read) but I don't have one.

 

First thing to try is hooking up the HDD to another computer (Via SATA port or SATA-USB if you have an adapter). Format it on that computer and make sure it works fine (transfer files, try opening things from it, just basically test it), then pop it back in the laptop and see if it starts giving you problems.

What bios are you using? How are the drives configured in the bios? I assume when you say "short version, update Gateway bios, flash drive, install" you mean you flashed the SSD with the newest firmware. Don't forget to do the tweaks provided on the OCZ forum, mainly enabling Write-Back Cache and Advanced Performance, as well as disabling things like Superfetch, System Restore, 8.3NameCreation, Indexing, and there are also several more things (Mainly registry changes) which allows you to allocate more into RAM so the SSD will have less use and will last longer/be even faster. Once you get the HDD working alongside you can also put the pagefile onto it.

It shouldn't take hours to format the drive. What settings are you using? NTFS Quick 4096KB?