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My hard drive has been acting slow lately, taking several seconds to load an application. It's the Hitachi HTS723232L9SA62 (7200 RPM). I ran a benchmark and the speeds were in the 70 Megabytes/second range. However, When I open an application (eg. Google Chrome), I run iotop (I use linux) and it says that my hard drive utilization is around 500 Kilobytes/second to 1 Megabyte/second. Sometimes it will peak around 15 Megabytes/second for a few seconds, then drop back to 1-2MB/s. There are not SMART errors.

How is this possible? Why do benchmarks show my hard drive speed as 60 times faster than the speeds I am getting? How is it possible to get speeds this low? This sounds like fragmentation, but I am using linux with and ext2 file system, so fragmentation should be minor or nonexistent. I have over 200GB free out of the 320GB hard drive.

My computer specs

  • Thinkpad x61
  • Intel Core2Duo 2.00GHz
  • 2GB DDR2-667 Memory
  • Hitachi HTS723232L9SA62 320GB 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive

Thanks for your help!

Mokubai
  • 95,412
Albert Z.
  • 91

2 Answers2

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In a benchmark, you will be writing to a continuous stream of sectors, and then reading back that stream of sectors, when booting an application, the head is tracking all over the disk loading many many files - this is your seek time.

To reduce this, I recommend a defragmentation.

The disk will also actively load something into memory (the 15mb/s), and then start to actually do its processing once it is loaded (the drop to nothing).

In Windows task manager you can view your HDD statistics.

Matt Clark
  • 2,104
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It is hard to answer without knowing your benchmarking software and how comprehensive and "real world test" based it is. In synthetic testing it could be benchmarking activities which do not really occur like when you use it with normal tasks. It could be writing/reading one contiguous stretch which often is not the case in reality. Maybe try another benchmarking software package and see how it goes from there.

Frankeex
  • 101