Sluggish WD HD on HP laptop Pavilion dv6 especially after reboot

Hi all,

I have a question here.

So, I have a Laptop not too old with specification in the 1st page of attachment.

It is pretty slow especially after reboot. I cut back on almost every applications from start menu and msconfig menu. I have done tune up as well deleting temp file, run ccleaner. I don’t know what else to try. I also did disk defragmentation which did not improve anything really. I still think that HD might be performing sluggishly. The second page in attachment is what i have for Hard Disk. I know it is ONLY 5400 rpm but still though. I ran a couple benchmark test with HD tune: the picture on 3rd page of attachment is the first benchmark right after reboot and you could see how bad was performing. On page 4 you could see new benchmark done later on and seem better. The last two attachemnts are for differnt test.

 I also opened the back panel and checked for loose connections and such without any result. Any suggestion to try to see what could be the bottleneck of this system?

Do you think that this HD performs per specs?

Thanks guys.

 

Anyone?

Hi what does it say under the health tab , the health tab shows you the smart data on the drive if it has bad sectors or is failing on other points. Also give hard drive sentinel a try it will give you a fast report on the health of the drive. So in the smart data we look for bad sector count, reallocated sector count and on laptops the g-sense report. When you have large dips in the graph that normally means it is having problems reading sectors.

Hi there,

This is screen shot of the health tab. What parameter do i have to look for?

Thanks for responding.

judging from the benchmarks and SMART log alone, I don’t see an issue here. This is what I expect to see from a 5.4k 2.5" drive.

If you want to improve upon that, you might want to stop it from going into idle too quickly. Check out WDIDLE3 and quietHDD if you want to test it. The Load Cycle Count is really high, so that might have hurt the disks life expectancy, but right now, it’s still lively (error rate doesn’t indicate anything wrong).

Also, since you have a lot of RAM on that laptop:

If you never fill those 6GB, you might want to disable Virtual Memory (located under Control Panel → System → System Properties → Advanced → Performance Settings → Advanced → Change).

Other than that, there is nothing else I could think of. Also you should run benchmarks like these without other applications or the OS interferring → Use a LiveCD or something

Since it isnt the HDD (in my eyes) it might be some software (like anti-virus **bleep**) that slowing everything down immensely.

Oh an btw, there is a tool that comes with windows starting with vista: Snipping Tool. With that, you should be able to properly take screenshots without all that white border around (I blame paint!) :smiley:

Hi yes the smart data looks fine. You don’t want to disable Virtual Memory 6 gig of ram is not that much and should be fine 64 bit windows is ment to handle a lot more than that. If you replace the drive the WD black would be faster but also gives a bit of vibration to the laptop. The only thing I see is it is running a bit hot at 52c. You can test the drive with WD data lifeguard tools and see if it passes all the test’s but remember as the drive came with your laptop it is under one year warranty from HP only.

Thanks for your replies.

 this case with HD being fine there should be something else that interfere with my system as a whole.

any other suggestion that I can look into to try?

Thanks

in one of your HDD benchmarks, your CPU usage is pretty high for a mere HDD stress test/benchmark. make sure that this is actually caused by the benchmark. other than that, I’m out of ideas immigranta.