ReadSpeed helped me troubleshoot a slow laptop

[Warwagon]

I was working on a customer's laptop last night and the Hard drive performance was in the toilet.

To give you an idea of the slowness, I was going to create a 2H2 Windows 10 ISO. After the download had finished it started to create the ISO and it took over 1 hour when it normally just takes a couple of mins.

I checked the smart data and it had a clean bill of health (That's not to say there wasn't still a bad sector(s) on the drive.

He had not used the laptop in a while and it still had windows 10 version 1709. So I was going to format and reinstall windows.

This would give him the newest version of windows, plus see if the reinstall makes things go any faster.

But then I thought, let me first run Readspeed on the hard drive and see what kind of performance it currently has.

The results were in.

Driv Size  Drive Identity     Location:    0      25%     50%     75%     100
---- ----- ---------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
81   2.0TB ST2000LM007-1R8174            130.6   124.4    49.5    89.1    61.1

                  Benchmarked: Thursday, 2020-12-24 at 09:55
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

As you can see around the 50% mark the speed peter pan's off a cliff and does not trail down gently as expected.


Seeing those numbers I said screw it and sent him out to Walmart to get an SSD. After the SSD the system ran much better (Obviously)

Very handy little tool.

I also ran it on a 750GB 2.5 inch hard drive I had laying around and it was a
A MUCH more gradual decline in speed, at 50% it was still in the 80's.

Driv Size  Drive Identity     Location:    0      25%     50%     75%     100
---- ----- ---------------------------- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
81   750GB TOSHIBA MK7559GSXF            106.9    96.4    87.4    71.4    53.7

                  Benchmarked: Thursday, 2020-12-24 at 09:51
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

[Warwagon]

On a side note, is the Driv column suppose to be missing the E on the word "Drive"

 

[Barry Wallis]

@Warwagon: You can get SSDs at Walmart?

 

[Warwagon]

@Warwagon: You can get SSDs at Walmart?

Yep, our local Walmart stocks 500GB and 1TB WD Blue SSD's. I've sold a lot of them because I just send people out there to pick one up. Recently checked and they had about 5 of each size on stock.

 

[Barry Wallis]

Yep, our local Walmart stocks 500GB and 1TB WD Blue SSD's. I've sold a lot of them because I just send people out there to pick one up. Recently checked and they had about 5 of each size on stock.

I would have never even thought to look there.

 

[Steve]

On a side note, is the Driv column suppose to be missing the E on the word "Drive"

You're not the first person to ask, Adam. But 4 chars allows me to center the 2-digit BIOS number underneath. So... “Driv.”

 

[pmikep]

I have removed my content

 

[Warwagon]

You're probably going to get tired of people sending in the "typo." Might change it to "Drv" instead. (Or Dryv? The British spelling. )

That's what I was thinking. Make it DRV, then it looks much less of a typ. Looks more intentional.