Very slow hard disk read/write speed! Need causes and solutions
Hi
I have a late 2006 model 20" iMac with 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo, 250GB Western Digital SATA II hard drive and 2.5GB of RAM.
Recently, the hard drive performance had plunged where the spinning ball had started to appear more frequently, applications started to hanged and it seems to take forever to copy large files from an external HDD. I have read similar problems in other topics and tried all the solutions/workaround given but still cant solve the problem I am having:
1. Tried the Disk Utility to Verify/Repair Disk and also Disk Permissions, restarted in the single user mode to execute the /fsck -fy command, restarted in Safe Mode for the disk check, downloaded AppleJack for diagnostics.
2. Initially using Tiger, purchased Leopard just to ensure there's nothing wrong with software, where I have wiped out the hard drive to make a clean install of Leopard. The problem persists, so I tried to reinstall Leopard again, but nothing did changed.
3. Attempted to erase the hard disk with "write zeros" options, but it takes forever to finish, as in 14 days! Yes, I know this is absurd as I had done this before and it only took around 5-7 hours maximum on this 250GB hard drive. So I proceed with only a plain erase as a try. Still no changes.
4. Did a Western Digital Diagnostics test while booting in Windows XP, which went along for around an hour or so, and the BSOD came out. Need to restore to a previous restore point to boot in again.
5. Found a problem of hard disks being in a PIO state instead of Ultra DMA and I have fixed it in Windows, but still no changes. I do not know if you can fix that in OS X?
That is pretty much what I have done and tried to solve this. But still cant figure out any solutions.
And this is the benchmark results I did in Xbench for the disk performance:
Sequential 1.00
Uncached Write 0.52 0.32 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 0.49 0.28 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 55.31 16.19 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 123.67 62.16 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 4.16
Uncached Write 19.01 2.01 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 1.14 0.36 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 44.00 0.31 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 139.69 25.92 MB/sec [25
Where the centre number is just the score for each speed achieved. You can clearly see how low is the disk speed. 😟
Could any of you list the possible causes for this and possibly the solution including the advice of replacing the HDD? It seems like my HDD's busted.
Also, I am looking at purchasing a 500GB WD for a replacement.
Thanks in advance.
I have a late 2006 model 20" iMac with 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo, 250GB Western Digital SATA II hard drive and 2.5GB of RAM.
Recently, the hard drive performance had plunged where the spinning ball had started to appear more frequently, applications started to hanged and it seems to take forever to copy large files from an external HDD. I have read similar problems in other topics and tried all the solutions/workaround given but still cant solve the problem I am having:
1. Tried the Disk Utility to Verify/Repair Disk and also Disk Permissions, restarted in the single user mode to execute the /fsck -fy command, restarted in Safe Mode for the disk check, downloaded AppleJack for diagnostics.
2. Initially using Tiger, purchased Leopard just to ensure there's nothing wrong with software, where I have wiped out the hard drive to make a clean install of Leopard. The problem persists, so I tried to reinstall Leopard again, but nothing did changed.
3. Attempted to erase the hard disk with "write zeros" options, but it takes forever to finish, as in 14 days! Yes, I know this is absurd as I had done this before and it only took around 5-7 hours maximum on this 250GB hard drive. So I proceed with only a plain erase as a try. Still no changes.
4. Did a Western Digital Diagnostics test while booting in Windows XP, which went along for around an hour or so, and the BSOD came out. Need to restore to a previous restore point to boot in again.
5. Found a problem of hard disks being in a PIO state instead of Ultra DMA and I have fixed it in Windows, but still no changes. I do not know if you can fix that in OS X?
That is pretty much what I have done and tried to solve this. But still cant figure out any solutions.
And this is the benchmark results I did in Xbench for the disk performance:
Sequential 1.00
Uncached Write 0.52 0.32 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 0.49 0.28 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 55.31 16.19 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 123.67 62.16 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 4.16
Uncached Write 19.01 2.01 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 1.14 0.36 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 44.00 0.31 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 139.69 25.92 MB/sec [25
Where the centre number is just the score for each speed achieved. You can clearly see how low is the disk speed. 😟
Could any of you list the possible causes for this and possibly the solution including the advice of replacing the HDD? It seems like my HDD's busted.
Also, I am looking at purchasing a 500GB WD for a replacement.
Thanks in advance.
iMac 20" Late 2006, Mac OS X (10.5.5), 2.16GHz C2D, 250GB HDD, 256MB X1600, 2.5GB RAM
