Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I'm having a very weird issue, and I believe the problem is with my HD. I've looked over the internet and couldn't find much, perhaps someone here have a hunch:

Symptoms:

-Major stuttering in games while accessing the HD (like autosaves, some games stop for a whole second when, say, you grab an item ingame it has to save)
-When starting some applications that use HD heavilly on startup Windows will take too much time to open. I've noticed this in programs like Chrome and even the Task Manager. They take like 10-15 seconds to open, and the HD gets accessed the entire time before they load.
- A program that shows information about your hardware (similar to CPU-Z), detects my whole hardware and just before detecting the two HDs it freezes the whole OS for about 30 seconds.

All of the above got a bit worse when switching from Windows 7 to 8..
I know all of these can be interpreted as a slow PC in general, but look at my specs, this build shouldn't be behaving like this.

However:

- Boot times are real good.
- Every application I tried says my HD fitness and health rates are fine. Error checks return nothing. The only thing performance related I could find that shows something negative about the HD is Windows Experience Index. It gives my HD a 5.9 while everything else gets more than 7.0 (in Windows 8 the index maximum is 9.9)
- The symptoms seem only to appear when the whole computer is under load, like ingame or using some more heavy apps (small/medium file transfers, for example, seem to behave just as they should)

Anyone has any ideas? I've thought about power issues with the HD, but I don't know how to check something like that (maybe my power supply could be undervolting the HD when onload?)

My primary HD is a 1TB Western Digital WD10EARS-00Y5B1. I'm using 21% of the disk. I also got a similar 500Gb one as disk D:/

Thanks for anything in advance XD

Dude, i got that too and it looks like we even have the same HDD

I think it's a HD issue, since it didn't happen when i was playing some Skyrim on Wine on Ubuntu on a 5200rpm Drive. May also be related to Ubuntu. i dunno.

So, you think it is model specific issue, or smth to do with Windows (maybe related to this model with Windows, although Id find that really weird)?
My drive is 7200rpm btw.

Meh, found this at WD Forums, among other similar messages:

Quote:I just registered at the wd community to share my expirience with WD green edition drives.
My work is in an company where I build and support over 50 workstations and few servers.
Almost 10 years i used to buy only WD hard drives.
Last year I build few PCs with WD10EARS-00Y5B1 [Green] for system drives. Result was ridicoulus- OS stutters an lags ,like when using dying HD ,but no any errors in event log,the drives pass the WD tests w/o errors. One of the workstations was my boss!!! home computer,another one for a very close friend. I used to try everything to fix the issue but w/o succes. Finally decide to change the HDDs - Acronis migrate and now everything is fine. WD loose an consumer of 100 HDDs per year average. That is.

Also a lot of people online seem to dislike these green drives. I can't believe I'll have to buy another HDD to fix this, it is like, 3 months old!! This is ridiculous.

Nah, mine is actually the EARS-00MVWB0
Guess that applies to all HDDs of that range.

Also a green drive, big meh.

Do you guys recommend any specific HDD brand if I were to buy a new one?

Thanks for the info, all my HDs are WD but the older ones. I believe Seagate is the only other giant HD dedicated company but i can't vouch for them.

Quote: Windows Experience Index. It gives my HD a 5.9

Any mechanical HDD (as in, non-SSD) will get 5.9 or lower. I had the same panic, and when I looked into it, my HDD was actually as good as had been implied when I bought it.

So that's one more HDD test that says nothing's wrong with it..
But Im actually getting the stutters and slowdowns :S

(03-26-2013, 07:05 AM)Runo Wrote: [ -> ]Also a green drive, big meh.

Do you guys recommend any specific HDD brand if I were to buy a new one?

Anything in the WD Blue or Black series would be fine or the seagate 7200.xx series. I have used a good mixture of both throughout the years and have always been pleased.

Green drives are best for backup drives. None of them are 7200 rpm, that I know of, most believe they are around 5400 rpm. Their official spec for Rotation Speed is "IntelliPower™." That said they are great drives; I have several as secondary data drives. I wouldn't use one for a primary drive though.

Obviously a firmware/drive issue. It sounds to me like the drive might be staying in low power mode when it's not supposed to. Either that or something more serious. This is why I tend to stay away from power saving features that involve throttling unless they are absolutely necessary. You should not have bought a green drive for a primary desktop drive. I'm actually in the market for a new drive myself since I filled my 1.5TB so I've been doing a bit of research lately.

I've got my eye on this one right now: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149396
It seems too good to be true. A solid 3TB drive with good reviews, high cache, sata III support, etc. for $160?

But since you don't need as much space as me this is currently the top rated HDD on newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136697
500GB, $90