BleepingComputer.com: Hard Drive Bottlenecking?

I really think my hard drive is bottlenecking. A lot of the time when gaming, the hard drive light would flash like crazy or stay solid when the game lagged for a few seconds. The hard drive is Seagate Barracuda 160GB ST3160812AS. Would it be a good idea to buy a faster hard drive like this to stop this bottlenecking? This hard drive is way faster then the current one if you compare there specifications. My processor is a Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz, my ram is a G.Skill NT 1GB DDR2-800 and the graphics card is Asus EAH5670 1GB. Also i forgot to add that i use this program call Moo0 SystemMonitor and it shows the bottlenecking in red which comes up as the hard drive when gaming or loading general stuff. The hard drive is in good condition, i have already ran diagnostic tools on it and it came out clean. When playing games like Team Fortress 2, it struggles to even start game properly. Usually i would have to skip the video part which shows the Valve part and that goes to loading but sometimes that part even doesn't load up which requires me to hard reset. If i don't skip it, the screen just goes blank after the logo video parts. Another game like GTA IV which takes it's time to even start the game itself. So i think my hard drive is really causing all these bottlenecking.

This post has been edited by killerx525: 13 July 2011 - 12:24 AM

Have you checked your device manager to see if your hard drive is set to ULTRA DMA 5?

This setting can be found and set in your system's BIOS setup utility by selecting the hard drive in question on the BIOS's main menu, where the system date and time are selectable. Once the drive is selected, there should be an option to select the parameters for the drive.

PIO is much slower than UDMA and it happens occasionally where this setting reverts to PIO instead of UDMA when changes are made to the system.

It is certainly worth checking this out, if you see PIO set at 4 and UDMA set at 0 or 1, you should correct that and make PIO 0 and UDMA 4 or even 5 if the system permits.

Bruce.

Unfortunately there is nothing about changing that, i went through the whole Bios menu and nothing.

Please perform the following, so that we can get the exact specs of your computer. This will better assist us in helping you more.

Publish a Snapshot using Speccy

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http://speccy.piriform.com/results/HN4P0SQSnuCLQjgDoD57E3k

Please run Temp File Cleaner to free up some space as your drive is running critically low on free drive space.

Partition ID: Disk #0, Partition #1
Disk Letter: C:
File System: NTFS
Volume Serial Number: 44EA1867
Size:  141GB
Used Space: 113GB (81%)
Free Space: 28.1GB (19%)

Only 630mb were removed.

killerx525, on 13 July 2011 - 02:19 AM, said:

This only shows up when you are in the BIOS screen and high-lite the hard drive and press the enter key, a drop down menu will appear, this has to be chosen from the MAIN BIOS screen, not the BOOT menu.

Bruce.

I did that but it's not there. This board is a OEM Acer FQ965M, so it's pretty limited.

then its time to remove some applications, or disable system restore to remove restore points.

Most of the space are used by the games i installed. Back to the question?

Its probably saying that its bottlenecking due to low disk space.

Are you sure that's possible?

Yes it is quite possible.

So how does low disk space cause bottlenecking?

This post has been edited by killerx525: 13 July 2011 - 10:36 AM