Asus N56VB-S4016H disk response time

Question

We recently bought 3 Asus N56VB-S4016H laptops, and although the specs are great for the price it costs, we are experiencing similar issues on all 3 of the devices.

After startup, a cold boot or from hibernate, the average disk response time (as indicated by the Windows 8 task manager) jumps very high, basically making the system unresponsive for minutes after boot.

The system is in the status is was bought in (unmodified), except I disabled a lot of the default programs, unstalled some others, deactived some services, etc. General disabling of stuff I don't need and just consume processing power.

When I say high response times I'm talking of response times between the 10 and 60 seconds. Doing some reading online, this seems to almost always be a result of faulty hardware. Maybe the laptops we received contain a faulty batch of HDDs or MOBOs. Besides the disk issues, everything else is speedy. Both the CPU and GPU are working well.

Because the previous RMA request we made on the same laptop (broken touchpad, kinda unrelated) caused us to wait for months before the laptop was available for working again, I want to make sure it is a hardware issue that RMA could resolve. Otherwise we'll be without a laptop for possibly months without any resolution to the problem.

Are there any ways to exactly diagnose the problems, and to see if we can take it up with the manufacturer?

Answer 1

No magic here, to lower the cost of your laptop, manufacturers have to make some concession when it's time to choose hardware components.

Most of the time, manufacturers choose to lower the resolution of the screen and choose a cheap hard drive, which make the computer looks cheap.

In your case, you have a HDD spinning at 5400 RPM, which is slow (good HDD have 7200 RPM).

When you start your computer or resume from hibernate, your computer needs to load your data from the HDD to your RAM. This explain why it's slow in those cases.

Want to solve the problem? You have three choices:

• Disable hibernate and use computer sleep instead (your data will stay in your RAM, which use a little bit power but offer more decent speed)
• Buy a faster HDD (7200 RPM), it will be noticeable but not blazing fast
• Buy a SSD, which is REALLY fast. Seriously, when you try it you never go back.

Hope this help