Has anyone has any expierences with having a slow or old Hard Drive? I am having TONS and TONS of problems, with my video card, games and etc. I am running my OS (98se) off of my old 3 gig hd. the Hard drive is older than about 4 years. I am just curious. I might take my 20 gig and make it my os hd. but before I go doing anything, has anyone had a problem with an old hd?

1) perhaps you could try defragging your hdd.. years of moving, installing and deleting files could have lead to the scattering of your data all over the hdd, making it harder and slower for the computer to find all the file fragments.

2) if your computer doesnt have more than 32mb of RAM (or even if it does) try setting up some virtual memory on your hdd to allow real RAM to free up some resources to do more important processing jobs.

3) well theres more, but my brain is too lazy right now.

i dont know about your problem, but i had winodws 95, upgrade to 2000, and my programs are running slower then on 95????!??! i have NO clue why. If anybody can explain that to me, please do!

Btw, scan for viruses and defrag, thats my best bet. It shouldn't really slow down much mechanically. There might be a slight gap, but not usally big enough to tell the differance.

im running a 350mhz, 256mg, 40gig, 32 virtural ram (dont even need it)

What upsets me is they ran fine on my 95 (with few exceptions), but now that i have windows 2000 they are all slow!! It dont make any sense!

[EDIT] i have already defraged, virus scan 2002 edition, FRESH download of all current viruses, so it HAS to be a os problem, and there must be a way to fix it.

[edited by - DarkHunter on April 5, 2002 1:49:28 AM]

Assuming you have a fairly fast hard disk controller, then hard drive speed can and will drastically change the performance of your system. And it''s quite possible that your 3GB is much slower than the 20GB, but the opposite can also be true.

The two things you should pay attention to on a hard drive when making a purchase are average seek time and rotational speed. I have seen arguments saying rotational speed doesn''t matter that much, but in my personal experience it really does. I have seen slow systems with 7200RPM drives outperform faster systems with 5400RPM drives when loading programs. And if you don''t have enough RAM (or are playing huge games), then hard drive speed is even more important because of virtual memory.

So first (like wAVaRiaN said), degrag your hard drive. Second, download a harddrive benchmarking utility and test the speed of the two drives and make a real comparison. I would say anything over a 1MB/sec difference is definately worth the trouble of re-installing.

(and off topic)
If you really want INSANE performance (with a high cost), you can always buy a RAID controller and two identical 7200RPM ATA100 (or ATA133, if you can find them) drives. I have had excellent success with striping RAID drives. Mirrored RAID didn''t really gain anything performance wise (it''s supposed to, but I didn''t see it).

But that would only be a soltion if you knew that the hard drive was the main bottleneck on speed. :-)

--TheMuuj

How much free space do you have on your hd?

The more space you use on your hd, the lower the performance (sad but true).

Defrag at least once a month. I used to run the maintance wizard when I went to sleep, and it was STILL running when I woke up! 8 hours of defragging is crazy, but grab win me's defrag, it's at least 2x faster.

Also, you don't want your hd to do alot of swapping, you can hear the hd chugging away (swapping) when you launch a program. That happened ALOT when I had 64 MB RAM, but now it's 128 MB and everything runs smooth. Also, I read somewhere your swap disk size should be about 2.5x the amout of RAM you have. You can change that in control panel/system/virtual memory.

You can also enable DMA, but this isn't recommended by me or MS. When I enabled DMA my HD speed upped by 20% for a month, then it dropped 40% permanently until I reformated my drive. Research DMA if you're really desperate.

Pick up SiSandra 2002, it'll benchmark the main parts of your computer and perform diagnosis automatically! Plus it's shareware!

If you have a 3GB hd, and those came stock with 1997 computers, it's probably time to buy a new computer, they now come stock with 30GB hd's and 256MB RAM.

-------------------------------------------------------
"if Gates is Money and Money is God then Gates is God."
"There is no afterlife for a place that started as heaven." - Charles M. Russell
"I'm not always right, but isn't it weird how i'm always right."

[edited by - kingpin on April 5, 2002 2:07:16 AM]

quote:

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Original post by DarkHunter
i dont know about your problem, but i had winodws 95, upgrade to 2000, and my programs are running slower then on 95????!??! i have NO clue why. If anybody can explain that to me, please do!

Btw, scan for viruses and defrag, thats my best bet. It shouldn''t really slow down much mechanically. There might be a slight gap, but not usally big enough to tell the differance.

im running a 350mhz, 256mg, 40gig, 32 virtural ram (dont even need it)

What upsets me is they ran fine on my 95 (with few exceptions), but now that i have windows 2000 they are all slow!! It dont make any sense!

[EDIT] i have already defraged, virus scan 2002 edition, FRESH download of all current viruses, so it HAS to be a os problem, and there must be a way to fix it.

[edited by - DarkHunter on April 5, 2002 1:49:28 AM]

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You have to remember that your system, while excessively fast in the time of Windows95, is rather slow in the time of Windows 2000. I would set your virtual ram (or Page File) to a minimum of 768MB and a maximum of 768MB (or higher if you wanted to waste the space). Despite what you may think, you DO need this much when running Windows 2000. I have XP and 256MB of physical RAM (I need more), and I set aside a gig for my page file.

Windows NT (Windows 2000 is WinNT 5) manages your system resources much differently than Windows 95 did. There is a lot more going on in the background that you did not have in Windows 95. You may want to look into disabling some background system services, but make sure you know what a service does before you disable it. Right click My Computer and go to Manage to get to the Services control panel.

And having a virus scanner is also a big speed-killer (if you leave it running all the time).

But the biggest problem (as I have mentioned) is that Windows 95 was optimized for Pentium/60s with 16MB of RAM, and Windows 2000 is optimized for Pentium 3 500s with 256MB of RAM (or somewhere in that area).

If you don''t believe me, try putting Windows For Workgroups 3.11 on your system. It will blaze. (Don''t use any earlier Windows because they are purely 16-bit, which will probably be slower on a modern PC....WFW had SOME 32-bit code).

--TheMuuj

I know what you are talking about.
For over 3 months I thought that my computer was just running slow. Turned out that the hard drive was getting slow. Degragging didn''t help because it was just slow.
This is a 30GB Maxtor drive, and for some reason it just decided to be really really slow one day.
Games would take forever to load, Windows would take forever to install, and it got so bad that I would cause so much lag on gaming nights.
I was at a LAN party and someone popped in a spare drive with Windows already installed, and my computer was blazing fast again (I have an 800Mhz machine).
So now I have a 40GB Western Digital, and my computer is running nicely. I still have the 30GB drive, and I am now wondering if I can get it replaced by Maxtor''s tech support...I don''t have a receipt of purchase for it or anything, so I don''t know if that will be possible.

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(Gorgeous graphics)+(beautiful sound effects)+(symphonic music)+(no gameplay) != Good game

Ok, this is great with yoru replies, tanx.

some more info, I have an Epox 8kha+, and the award bios says "33" for my 3gig, and "100" for my 20 gig. I''m guessing ATA 33 and 100. So, my 3gig is REALLY slow I presume. My 20 gig is 6400RPM. and I have no idea of my 3gig, I presume 100RPM ;-).

Ya, I''d like to get a RAID setup, but not much $$$ on this end.

I''ve defragged, and I ran a full system virus scan yesterday, (158,000 files, not one thing infected).

the HD (3gig) is over 4years old. I have about 1 gig free on the 3 gig, I have everything on my 20. Does anyone strongly suggest I swap them? make the 20 gig my OS HD, and just trash the 3 gig? (well not trash, it is fine for another computer I am about to put together for my family)

ALSO! my computer is a speed demon really, I have an XP1800+ (1.53gz) and 256 MB of Crucial Micron RAM. Along with a radeon8500. I''ve held onto the 3 gig for I don''t know really ;-)

Yes, I can hear it chugging and chugging away, I have set aside 650 MB of Virtual memory for it, but it stil chugs and runs slow.

one last note, I ripped it out of my old Pavillion 3300, VERY OLD if you know what I mean, I reformated a month ago. and I defragged 6 weeks ago,

quote:

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Original post by ThinIce
ALSO! my computer is a speed demon really, I have an XP1800+ (1.53gz) and 256 MB of Crucial Micron RAM. Along with a radeon8500. I''ve held onto the 3 gig for I don''t know really ;-)

Yes, I can hear it chugging and chugging away, I have set aside 650 MB of Virtual memory for it, but it stil chugs and runs slow.

one last note, I ripped it out of my old Pavillion 3300, VERY OLD if you know what I mean, I reformated a month ago. and I defragged 6 weeks ago,

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From what you''ve said, the hard drive is definately your bottleneck, and ATA100 will definately help your speed.

So yes, I''d recommend you switch them out. There''s nothing else that could really be slowing your system down, except for a possible misconfiguration (like using 3 DIMMs on a nForce board, but there are too many possibilities to check).

Do you have another computer you could network with to help transfer your files? Or a CD-burner? This will make the job a lot easier (I reinstall my OS about every 6 months...with every major computer upgrade, and both methods work well).

--TheMuuj