HP 2710p HD running slowly

Hi,

I'm having an issue with my laptop's hard drive. There are frequent pauses in its disk activity, so programs like outlook regularly just "lag".

I ran HD tune and the attached image is the graph output.

I compared it to other reviews of the same HD in different laptops and I found that there must be something wrong with my drive. Other notebooks with the same disk don't show anything like my laptops performance graph.

I thought that maybe the disk was faulty, so I replaced the disk under warranty and it is STILL doing this.

One thing I have tried today is revert back to vista (was using XP) and the problem still exists but it isn't so bad. The drops go to 9mb/sec rather then 3mb/sec.

Anyone have any idea why I am getting such weird performance?

 

Hi,

Are there any other owners of the 2710p who are willing to share HD tune graphs of their disk?

It would be very helpful in my troubleshooting.

 

KamiCrazy,
Is your laptop an ultramobile?
The drive you have is a 1.8" 100Gb drive.
Actually your benchmark is pretty good for a 1.8" drive.
I have a friend with a 80gb 1.8" drive which does 18mb/sec.

K-TRON

 

Yeah its an ultraportable.

The issue isn't the "average" mb/sec. Its more that it often spikes down to 3mb/sec transfer.

It doesn't make any sense that I get these weird pauses.

 

Sorry I lied, I thought it was 80gb, but it is 60Gb.

Here is the hdtune of a 40Gb 1.8" drive


and we upgraded it to a 60gb 1.8" drive


The benchmarks were on a Fujitsu Siemens Ultramobile, but the results should be similar across the board for 1.8" drives.
The size constraints of the drive is really what slows them down. Most 1.8" drives are 3600rpm or less, as a higher rpm motor is hard to fit with discs in such a small drive.

If possible go into the start menu, and go to the run command. Type in MSCONFIG. Than shut off background processes and programs which you are not using. That should help speed things up a bit.
Also try running disc cleanup and defragment on the drive, and that should clear up sone of the jumps in the benchmark.

Unfortunately 1.8 drives are very slow, and from all 1.8" drive hdtune results, the results are similar, very slow, with lots of ups and downs. The jaggies are most likely because of the low rpm and the very slow seek times, which inhibit the speed of the drive in synthetic tests.

I would switch back to XP, since it uses less resources. It should run faster in XP to.

K-TRON

 

The first graph of the 40gb is like the graph I get in vista. Lots of up and downs but the variance is within 10mb/sec.

The second graph of the 60gb one is what I expect my graph to behave like. It's slow but there isn't much spiking. With a relatively smooth line curving downwards.

What I am expecting my drive to do is what your 60gb is showing. A relatively smooth curve.

What I am getting is incredible spikes in transfer rate.

 

That hdtune was done right after a clean install of the operating system. When the operating system is frehly installed, their are no programs hogging the harddrive, and thus it bench's good. You may have installed some programs, or have programs running in the background, which are causing your drive to work when it should be idling. The need for your harddrive by some programs is causing hdtune to become interrupted since the drive is being accessed by some other program.
Of these spikes occur right after a fresh install, than it is just the way the harddrive works.
Try shutting off background processes and see what happens.

Your 100Gb drive looks like it is the fastest 1.8" drive if it werent for those spikes.

K-TRON

 

Going back to the start of this thread, those downward spikes are caused by other programs / processes accessing the HDD. HDTune sees a drop in performance when that happens.

It could well be a virus scanner or indexing. If you want to know what it is then you can try one of the SysInternals utilities.

I have much the same HDtune graph, without the downwards spikes, for the MK1011GAH in my Sony G11.

John