PC Hardware Problem

[Viper_Maniac]

Ok now this started a couple months ago. Back then it wasn't this bad like it is now. Then it just used to be subtle slowness. Now its worse. Whenever I try to install anything it takes 3-4 times longer than it should. If I try to unzip anything(includes self extracting exe's) it goes so painfully slow. In just general use of the PC it will pause for a few seconds or more. Internet browsing is a pain. I'll get full system pauses if I have more than 2 or 3 tabs open.

Now I've run a few apps to test a few things. First I ran Memtest (regular & +), HDTune and Western Digital Diagnostics and none of them found anything wrong. I know its a hardware problem because I experience similar problems in Linux(Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy).

One problem I really have is that I don't have any spare parts to test on my hardware so I can try to pinpoint what the troublemaker is. I also don't know anyone that would have any.

I did a small little test of my own where I selected a file approximately 270-290MB on both hard drives and copied them to another folder on their own respective drives. The IDE drive file copied in 10-15secs. The SATA drive file took over 10mins to copy(Prolly would have been more I hadn't stopped it). I don't know if that might give an indication as to where to start.

To make matters worse I just don't have the money to buy a new mobo/cpu/memory. I'm hoping someone here may be able to help me in some way figure this out. Oh and if you're looking for my system specs they're in my signature.

[Madoshi]

if its possible, you might try taking the SATA drive out and installing Windows on the IDE drive. if that fixes it, you can blame yer problem either on the mobo's SATA ports, or the drive itself.

[Viper_Maniac]

I believe I might have a 30GB IDE drive laying around here somewhere that I might be able to use for this experiment. I would rather not install on the 80GB in the system now because it has all my stuff on it right now. I'll give it a shot tomorrow.

[markwolfe Veteran]

In your Linux boot environment, post the results of:

sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda

(assuming sda is the drive in question)

And compare it to the results using the other drive you have. I would be interested in seeing what that shows for drive throughput.

[Viper_Maniac]

In your Linux boot environment, post the results of:

sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda

(assuming sda is the drive in question)

And compare it to the results using the other drive you have. I would be interested in seeing what that shows for drive throughput.

Compare with the 80GB IDE drive? I'll give it a shot as soon as I can.

[markwolfe Veteran]

And just for your comparison purposes, here are the results for my mid-budget PC that is about a year and a half old.

mark@mark-core2:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda
[sudo] password for mark: 

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   1676 MB in  2.00 seconds = 837.79 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  186 MB in  3.03 seconds =  61.48 MB/sec
mark@mark-core2:~$

The "buffered" reads are the ones we are after.

[Viper_Maniac]

Well I ran what you wanted and here's my results:

SATA

/dev/sda:

Timing cached reads: 1752 MB in 2.00 seconds = 875.75 MB/sec

Timing buffered disk reads: 130 MB in 3.02 seconds = 42.99 MB/sec

IDE

/dev/sdb:

Timing cached reads: 1642 MB in 2.00 seconds = 820.42 MB/sec

Timing buffered disk reads: 146 MB in 3.03 seconds = 48.13 MB/sec

I was assuming that "sdb" was my 80GB drive.

Sorry for being late with this. Something had come up.

[markwolfe Veteran]

Not a problem.

I'm not seeing a large difference between the two. Now, hdparm is just a quick check from the start of the drive. There is a tool that takes a longer closer look: bonnie++

You can install it with a sudo apt-get install bonnie++. Run it from the terminal, same as the other command. It spits out a lot of numbers, so make your terminal window about twice as wide, so you get good formatting.

You can try running that and see if you get any differences?

But other than that, I would have to conclude that you have similar performance between the two drives in Linux.

EDIT: A little info on bonnie++

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-hard-d...ware-howto.html

[Viper_Maniac]

Real sorry for taking so long to respond.

I tried running the command as before but it told me "invalid option -- t". Not sure what to use. I'm still a linux noob. ;)

[markwolfe Veteran]

You used a double-dash. There is only a single dash in the option.

[Viper_Maniac]

Ok I'm sorry but I'm doing something wrong here. I'm trying to type in the command similar to the hdparm one but I'm getting nowhere. This is what I'm trying to use: sudo bonnie++ -tT /dev/sda and I've also tried sudo bonnie++ -t /dev/sda. I'm obviously doing it wrong.

[markwolfe Veteran]

bonnie is not the same program as hdparm, so it doesn't accept the same parameters.

The link I sent shows you how to use it:

How do I use bonnie++?

Simply type bonnie++ or bonnie:

$ bonnie++

OR

$ bonnie

So you just need to type "bonnie" in your terminal.

And after that, you have about 10 minutes or more of testing, if I recall correctly. Go make a sandwich or something while it does it checks. :)