Storage SSD Lag due to hard drive?

Hi,

I have a Samsung 830 installed as well as a Caviar Blue 7200rpm. System installed on 830 and the hard drive is used for storage.

Sometimes when I am in an application and go to open a file for example the computer lags for a bit, during this lag I can hear the hard drive spinning up and then eventually it becomes responsive again when the hard drive is spinning at max.

Am I having to wait as the drive has gone to sleep and even though I do not wish to view a file on it it must spin up so it could be accessed if I wanted to?

If this is the case Ill remove it and simply store stuff on the SSD instead.

Your opinion would be valued.

Thanks

James

 

Turn off power management for thr hdd?

 

But then the drive is constantly spinning and the sound is annoying me. Probably easiest just to remove it.

 

You can find the "Turn off hard disk after" option in the advance panel of the current power plan of your system.
Start > type: Power, click on Power Options, then on the panel that will show click on "change advance power settings.", and it's under Hard Disk.

 

They are many ways to cut HDD noise.
You can get a case with a vibration rubber absorbing system for HDD (that is what I have, and pretty much all cases that is aimed to provide quiet computing)

If you want to mod, without using tools really, you can use elastic band (not normal elastics as they'll dry and snap), and place the HDD around it, making it float bellow where DVD drive is.

Like this:


By the way, this is the ultimate solution in making HDD quiet.

Or/and you can simply use quieter HDD's like The W.D Digital Caviar Black 1TB, where it spins down to 5400RPM when not in use, and accelerates to 7200RPM. And is accessible and ready at 5400RPM. So you have a quieter drive, and always ready.

 

I cant hear my drives because of rubber grommets/my case fans being louder than the hard disks

 

Same here.. well actually my fans are equally quiet, the problem is the GPU fan, which I rectified via my own software (which I think everyone here will love) which is going to be, well.. I'll try my best to be, released next week

 

If you have a SSD installed, you should have power management for drives turned off! Load up the SSD Magician software that came with the 830 and use the OS Optimisation feature. Tick everything it suggests, and let it do it's thing. Your problem will go away.

If you leave power management on so drives spin down, you're also going to be having your SSD power down too, and then garbage collection and TRIM will not be able to do their thing as effectively.

Turn disk power management off with a SSD installed.

 

I found that magician leaves the pc to go to sleep. You may want to turn that off manually in power settings too?

 

It's because by default Windows will set it to power down your HDDs after a certain time. Just turn this feature OFF in advanced power options.

Power options > Hard disk > Turn off hard disk after > NEVER