With Microsoft advertising the support for Windows 8 going away, I upgraded my HP dv4-1120US to Windows 8. I noticed a drop in copy operations and wanted to know the reason.
I looked at the new Performance tab on the Task Manager on the Win 8 desktop and saw that my disk showed a speed of less than 10MB/s when it showed 100% utilization.
I looked around on Google and saw some mention of DMA not being enabled on some drives being the cause of performance being low. The instructions on the page on the Microsoft site talk about an “Advanced” tab on the driver pages. I could not find that tab on my Windows 8 installation, but then I never installed any custom driver for my laptop on Windows 8 either.
So, I tried to look around on the WD site to find drivers for the same and could not find any.
I am looking for answers to the following questions:
-
Is 10MB/s normal performance for a 2008 laptop with SATA (1.5Gb/s) interface ?
-
If not, is the drop due to the harddisk being old (it is a home laptop so is not used much, couple hours a month) ?
-
Do I need drivers on Windows 8 to get better performance out of this machine ? If yes, where can I find them ?
-
Will dropping to Windows 7 help solve this problem ? Does the hard drive mentioned have a Win7 driver ?
-
If nothing else works, and I have to upgrade my hard drive to a newer one, will a SATA 2 / 3 drive give me better performance ?
Any answers for these questions will help me take decisions and resolve the issues.
Thanks for taking the effort to read and reply to this message.