Windows 7 installation - Hard drive clicking.

[nath]

I know what you're thinking, click of death but I'm pretty sure it's not that. It sounds like the hard drive is powering up after being flicked on to power save mode, gives up and tries again. It does this for as long as I access the drive. This is a drive I've been using for ages and has started literally just as I finished installing Windows 7. It's not the primary drive, just a secondary games drive and I can't quite work out why.

All my drives (5 of them) in my system are SATA, 4 of these 5 are Western Digital. All the others have no problem at all. One of these drives has just been wiped to have windows 7, the rest are still with their existing data. I did just switch the bios from IDE mode to AHCI mode on the sata interface but all the other drives have come through fine, why might this be clicking?

I'll try an Ubuntu live CD in a mo and see how that handles accessing it. Any other thoughts?

TIA!

 

[nath]

Posting from Ubuntu now and the drive is happily copying 200gb's of data to one of my other ones. Clearly it's happy enough with the bios change.

 

[nath]

Huzzah, triple post!

It seems that windows is shutting down the disk at every chance it gets. If I tell it to copy a single 4gb file it copies (albeit slowly - 5mb/s) and does no clicks. If I click on a folder, it clicks, spins up, shows the contents then spins down. Navigate elsewhere it does the same again.

In Ubuntu I was copying files at 20mb/s easily so something is fishy on this Win7 install.


edit: Turns out I just needed to install the chipset drivers which appears to sort out AHCI in Win 7. Sorted.

Move along, nothing to see here...

 

[TdC]

was that after the first install Nath? I'm just about to install it myself and poohing a large brick

 

[nath]

Yeah, first install. What was odd, I downloaded the SATA AHCI drivers on to my USB key and loaded them in the installer. It then told me that I couldn't install on any of my hard drives (whereas it was OK with it before). Rebooted, started the installer again and left out the drivers and it installed fine. Getting the chipset software installed afterwards fixed the problem immediately.

 

[TdC]

strange. I hope I don't run into any dodgy shite like that. good tip though: /me goes off to dl the usb wireless thingy's driver for '7 o0

 

[Kryten]

That's a remnant of a similar bug with Windows 2008 - same one also causes really dire USB performance with pen/external drives. Just made the move over to RTM Professional - the first driver I ever install on *anything* is chipset - even more important for this


PS : New graphics card fucking rocks - 7.4 in the penis measurement screen Makes my 8800GT look a bit sour

 

[nath]

Ooo, that's a point. I've not even done the windows score yet.

 

[TdC]

bahs, windaze 7 says my beautiful raid 5 of 4 spinpoints is only 5.9 on teh penis scales. Any ideas? I was initially looking at drivers for the mobo, but I'm unsure now, as the software did seem to get everything right, even my dodgy USB RT73 wifi thingy.

 

[Kryten]

5.9 is fine considering its Windows and the drivers making your raid work. I would only expect higher if you were raiding up Raptors, SSDs or other 10k RPM drives.

 

[TdC]

aye, which I am not, though getting an SSD to boot off of is in the planning atm

 

[old.Osy]

Raid 5 will not have you gain any significant drive performance, that's why my experience index for hdd is 5.9 aswell, and I run a single drive configuration.

go go raid 10?

 

[TdC]

yeah true dat, though I get reads off it like a mofo o0

might give it a fiddle as I'm selling this rig to my mate's boy anyway. gogo i7 and the wonders that is P45

 

[Malecheon]

We had a consultant from MS in at work about 2 weeks ago who said those scores are completely pointless and are only there to let hardware manufacturers pimp their latest offerings. We were given a set of MS internal tools to measure performance instead.

 

[MYstIC G]

bahs, windaze 7 says my beautiful raid 5 of 4 spinpoints is only 5.9 on teh penis scales. Any ideas? I was initially looking at drivers for the mobo, but I'm unsure now, as the software did seem to get everything right, even my dodgy USB RT73 wifi thingy.

Frankly I think the HDD ratings are a bit poo in general. My system got 7 or just shy of 7 for everything then the HDD was 5 point something (5.9 I think).

 

[TdC]

I'm wondering if I'll get an improvement if I do RAID 10 (mirror-stripe) in stead of 5 (parity-stripe). As this rig goes the coming weekend I may as well give it a shot

You don't have a P35 based mobo do you? I do, and it may be the chip is the limiter :/

 

[MYstIC G]

I do from memory, will double check when I get home.

 

[TdC]

nm mate: I just made a R1+0 and now I suddenly have 6.1 for disks however, the mirror-stripe means I now have "only" 50% of my disk capacity available for use, rather than the R5 n-1 formula, or in my case 75%. I'm not too sure that losing 750GB is worth the -very- slight performance bump.

 

[Noc0de]

You don't have a P35 based mobo do you? I do, and it may be the chip is the limiter :/

I assume you're running RAID through the on-board controller or do you have a separate controller card?

I've got a P35 mobo and currently running RAID 0 for my OS/games. However, I've bought a separate 320gb disk to install Windows 7 on, and was thinking of dropping RAID 0 in favour of RAID 5 across the 3 remaining disks I've got.

I'm not particularly fussed about losing my OS or my games that I've got on CD/DVD, but I wouldn't want to lose my steam folder, music, films etc. I'm thinking of using RAID 5 as more of a lazy mans back-up more than anything and wondering whether performance is a bit crap running on the P35 chipset or not?

 

[TdC]

tis actually fine, though nothing compared to a "real" RAID card in sustained reads and writes.

benchmarks tell me that my R5 setup with 4 spinpoint F1 (750GB) disks average 140MB/s read throughput, however the real world of (at the time) vista would never reach though figures, more like 80 or 90MB/s sustained (which is still pretty quick mind). Your actual performance is extremely dependent on the quality of your drivers.

when I bench now, with something like HDtach or HDtune, the graph is all over the place, which means to me that either the OCH9R chip is poo (likely) or the drivers for it are mëh (also likely) even though they're the ones delivered by the generic Windows 7 install.

what you want to see is something like my enclosed pic1, whereas what I get is enclosed pic2. please note that my bench is with the generic drivers and no level of tuning whatsoever.

however, as you say, before this I had R5 with 4 disks and slept easy in the off chance that something would fail. At the time my Vista rig was pretty unstable, and BSOD'ed often. The Intel software would often catch this, and rebuild the raid to optimum after a crash.

 

[Embattle]

ICH9R isn't the best but then again it does fairly well although naturally will use more CPU and also has a certain limit when it comes to higher raid levels and very high bandwidth.

Personally I've a i7 setup thus I've ICH10R and to this is attached 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 in RAID 0 shortstroked, the results are below although take with a pinch of salt when using these programs:

Now I suspect you might want to download:

*Intel(R) Matrix Storage Manager

Once installed Start Program -> View -> Advanced mode then if it isn't already expended click on Arrays -> Array_0000 -> Volumes. Now right click on Volume 0 and at the bottom you should find one called Enable Volume Write-Back Cache, click on it.

Personally the real way to get a lovely boost to Windows etc will be an SSD, they just have wonderful access times and maintain high bandwidth.

 

[Noc0de]

Thanks for the piccies and explanation guys.

Am I right in thinking I can get away with R5 on 3 disks? I've got 3 x 500gb Samsung Spinpoints (not F1's I'm afraid) that I've thinking of using...

I'd love to go for SSD's I'm afraid but can't afford it atm

 

[TdC]

Once installed Start Program -> View -> Advanced mode then if it isn't already expended click on Arrays -> Array_0000 -> Volumes. Now right click on Volume 0 and at the bottom you should find one called Enable Volume Write-Back Cache, click on it.

yeah, though you don't really want to do that unless you have a raid card with battery backed up memory caches so it can flush the last updates to disk in case the power fails. I suppose that's not too important in the consumer world though.

Am I right in thinking I can get away with R5 on 3 disks? I've got 3 x 500gb Samsung Spinpoints (not F1's I'm afraid) that I've thinking of using...

sure 3 is the minimum you need for R5. You'll end up with one 1TB volume. imo Raid 5 is nice, though your average DBA will try to kill you

 

[Embattle]

That is the general warning when enabling WBC but personally never had this issue crop up, nor do I tend to run any thing that matters.

 

[TdC]

hopefully you'll never notice it, just like you're actually not supposed to ever experience a RAID hole, and lots of other things. it all comes down to how extremely you value your data integrity, but tbh if you're that extreme in the first place, you won't be using a shitty thing like a cheapass onboard sata raid chip anyway

 

[Kryten]

My HD tach on a raid5 ICH9R setup as follows:

Only SATA 150 drives mind :/