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I have the Lenovo Y70-70. 4th gen i7, nvida gtx 960, 16 GB RAM, and a 1tb hybrid drive, so I know it can be faster. The problem is that the Disk usage regularly maxes out, and makes the computer lag. This is most pronounced on startup.
I recently upgraded the computer from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. I did a clean install, so my first thought was that I didn't have the right driver installed. After installing the driver, it gets up to 15 mb/s (it would only do 10 before) But obviously, that is still way slower than it should be.
The laptop is only a few months old, so the HDD shouldn't be worn out. Any idea what might be wrong with it?
1What driver did you install? You never specify that information. The 4th generation Intel Core family came out in 2013. So your laptop has to be older then a "few months". Hopefully you purchase from a reliable store, the Lenovo Y70-70, is a 2 year old model. – Ramhound – 2016-02-04T20:08:02.247
1how are you testing the throughput rate? are you reading or writing very large files, or many small ones? whatever file you use should be 300MB. that way the test takes at least one second, and isn't dealing with all the overhead of allocating new files in the filesytem metadata tables, scanning/seeking to a good block, etc. – Frank Thomas – 2016-02-04T20:08:08.630
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Check your hard drive for SMART errors How can I read my hard drive's SMART status in Windows 7?, and What is the easiest method of checking SMART status for your hard drive?
– DavidPostill – 2016-02-04T20:30:07.833@Ramhound It was the driver on the lenovo website for my laptop. It's an Intel "rapid storage" driver. Also, not that it's particularly relevant, but the specific processor used in the laptop was released in 2015.. – iCodeSometime – 2016-02-04T20:44:42.883
1Regular HDDs are just that slow. 15 MB/s is a very good speed for random access though. – Daniel B – 2016-02-04T20:46:15.910
@FrankThomas, I'm just using the task manager. That's what it's at when I'm trying to boot windows. – iCodeSometime – 2016-02-04T20:46:46.670
@DavidPostill Thanks! I already used the microsoft diskcheck utility, but I'll check for SMART errors too. – iCodeSometime – 2016-02-04T20:47:02.853
@kennycoc - 4th generation Intel Core CPUs were not released in 2015. It was released in 2014. which matches when Amazon started to stock it.
– Ramhound – 2016-02-04T21:04:35.337@Ramhound http://ark.intel.com/products/78934/Intel-Core-i7-4720HQ-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_60-GHz#launchdate
– iCodeSometime – 2016-02-04T21:27:54.037after doing the win10 install, have you reconfigured the SSD cache? looks like you only use the slower (5400rpm?) HDD now. – magicandre1981 – 2016-02-05T05:25:27.030
@kennycoc, you can't really test IO at that level, because what you are describing is more likely to indicate a problem with the tasks being performed rather than the IO response that each of them get. try testing the IO directly if you want to determine whether your disk is healthy. Otherwise a thousand tiny threads requesting IO could swamp the superIO controller with tiny requests, that only add up to a small amount of bandwidth, but take time to complete, causing other tasks to wait. a mechanical HDD can only do one thing at a time, so no inferences about drive health can be made. – Frank Thomas – 2016-02-05T12:47:16.887
@magicandre1981 it looks like that is the problem! From what I'm seeing, I need to change the bios setting.. Is there anything else I need to do to configure it? – iCodeSometime – 2016-02-05T15:36:55.527
you need to install ExpressCache again – magicandre1981 – 2016-02-05T16:28:39.110