Slow/sluggish disk access in Win 8.1

toshi

Frozen_up_north wrote: »

My OHs Acer Win 10 laptop was taking ages (3~5 mins) to boot and settle down. It’s an AMD and had 4GB of ram and 320GB HDD. No amount of tweaking, disk cleaning, etc. had any effect.

I replaced the HDD with a 250GB SSD (cloned the disk, warts and all) and upgraded the ram to 8GB. It now boots and settles down in “seconds”, or at least takes well under a minute to be operational without the drive light illuminated.

I suspect the SSD had more effect than the additional RAM, but the speed up was significant.

Agree, just a get an SSD Crucial MX500 500GB is less than £65 . (500GB was around £120-150, now dead cheap) Be happy.

https://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/ct500mx500ssd1

I used to spend a lot of time fine tuning stuff until I start to using SSDs. I really don't bother now with SSDs. In addition, SSDs can overcome disk intensive Windows Update attack. (i.e. all of Windows update failure is gone with SSDs)


Well, msconfig is a good start if you insist.

esuhl

I've found that a lot of antiviruses can affect disk read/write speeds, even when they're disabled. I'd try temporarily disconnecting from the internet, uninstalling the antivirus, rebooting, and trying again.

esuhl

toshi wrote: »

In addition, SSDs can overcome disk intensive Windows Update attack. (i.e. all of Windows update failure is gone with SSDs)

What's a "disk intensive Windows Update attack"? Doesn't the OS see SSDs and HDDs as identical storage devices, with the BIOS/UEFI handling low-level device stuff...?

esuhl

Oh, and I believe the read speed would be affected by the number of files on the disk, rather than the total filesize.


Also, the 2TB probably has data more densely packed than the 500GB one, so at the same rpm, the head could read more data per revolution.


And the cache-size of the HDD may be different. For intensive read/write applications, a large cache might make quite a difference to performance.

googler

Thanks all. Appreciate all the contributions

Events took an unexpected turn when I was switching off the wireless adaptor and disabling AV. I noted that in the list of network devices there were over 250 instances, under the Media Devices heading, of the Squeezebox Touch that I use as a music player with iPeng streaming from Logitech Music Server on another machine.

After a bit of scratching around on Logitech forums, I disabled Network Discovery on the Win 8.1 machine, and deleted all these instances of the player from it.

OH rebooted after I was done, and reports the machine is now zipping along quite nicely.

In the long term, I'm definitely going to get an SSD for it. 500Gb Samsung SSDs are down to £80 or so on Amazon. The existing disk will become the primary backup store.