Low disk performance with Windows 8.1

Question

I have a Dell XPS 15 (L502X) that have a Core i5-2450M, 6GB RAM and a 1TB WD 5400RPM HDD. This notebook Achilles' heel is the disk. It's slow and I understand that if I do stress it to much, it lends to sloppy system performance. Multitasking is quite complicated with this disk.

The real issue, however, is that with Windows 7 and OS X Mavericks I always had consistent performance running applications in a queue. E.g. Opening an IDE and then doing anything else.

Since I upgraded to Windows 8 (and 8.1) I had issues with the disk. IO operations are much slower and the disk can easily be brought to it's knees with anything that requires much reading/writing. Even ordinary tasks as opening a web browser are clearly slower on Windows 8.1. It the disk is being stressed by any applications, the entire system will freeze with disk usage jumping to 100% (even tho reading is barely at 4MB/s).

I tried many commonly internet found solutions as installing updated Intel's AHCI drivers or disabling file indexing. I also tried multiple re installations. The situation remained the same. The system is very sloppy when it comes to disk.

One very odd issue is that Windows 7 running on a VM inside Windows 8.1 is still faster than the host system on disk issues! It reads and writes much faster and launching light programs beats the hosting system big time.

Any thoughts on that?

Answer 1

1. disable windows search service (indexing)
2. disable windows defender (realtime*)
3. disable system protection (useless anyway, it even backups viruses lol, and many manufacturers have t heir own restore etc)
4. disable antivirus or try another antivirus (eset is pretty good and low on resources usage)
5. Almost like YLeven said, but set virtual memory to 512MB or 1024MB

6. switch to a 120GB or bigger SSD, and put the 1TB HDD in a external enclosure

   • sources well my own experience with slow drives

Answer 2

Reduce the virtual disk size such as to a maximum of 512Mb.

Control Panel -> System and Security -> System -> Advance System Settings -> Performance Options -> Advanced -> Virtual Memory -> (Change...)

Answer 3

My advice is to add this DWORD (32-Bit) Value registry setting: IoPageLockLimit setting under

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

and set it to Hex 50000. Originally I/O by default is 512 KB. There are many articles on the Internet that say that this setting is long and dead. I beg to differ. Try it and you'll notice a huge increase in response time. A hex value of 50000 should give you up to 300 MB of memory cache for I/O throughput. Experiment with higher settings if you have above 4 GB of RAM. If you want to benchmark, get a I/O monitoring utility.

Answer 4

have you check the health of the disk?

??

try to find out if write caching is enabled for this HD If after enabling the write caching it disables automatically, this is most likely caused by drive failure. I dont know the exact method to check it. maybe someone here could help you ^^

I know that windows 8 is putting app in ''stanby'' by writting them in ram. but if there is not enough ram, or after a while it is writing the info on the disk instead.

I dont know if this can be the issue

finally, if you dont find the source of the problem have you consider putting youre currant disk in a external drive case and putting a ssd in it??

is there anything using the disk, (check task manager)

edit::

have you check if write caching is enabled ?? I heard of some people where it was not.

Follow this procedure to disable/enable Disk Write Caching

1. Open Computer folder
2. right click C Drive
3. click Properties
4. select Hardware tab
5. double click on the Disk Drive, or select it then click properies
6. click on change settings
7. go to policies tab
8. check if enable write caching on the device is enable.

if it go back to be unchecked after you restart your computer it might mean hardware faillure.

Answer 5

I managed to improve the situation quite a bit. It isn't perfect yet, but the hiccups are gone and the overall performance when it comes to IO is now in line with my expectations about this system.

What I did to accomplish this was disable Windows' Superfetch and set the virtual memory manually to zero.

One should take not that disabling virtual memory isn't healthy if you're topping your RAM. As I have 6GB and usually have around 40% free on everyday usage, I found no harm in doing so.

Answer 6

1. install hwinfo
2. check hard drive info and find the s.m.a.r.t. section
3. see if anything is marked as warning, etc. this will give you an idea about hard drive's health
4. if the problems occur with different windows installations, it could be dependent on where on the disk the operating system is running from, you may see the hdd working fine when it's dealing with the part of hard drive where there are no bad sectors. so your configuration might be totally irrelevant.
5. if your hard drive is faulty, get rid of it as soon as possible, because you can't trust a faulty hard drive and they often fail shortly after problems start to occur.

if your hard drive is healthy, update or downgrade(yes) your sata controller device driver.

also, use resource monitor to see what program is using the hard disk the most, check total reads and writes columns. you can check what program did the most disk writes and reads and post here so that we can think of other causes.