Question: I have a Dell XPS 15 (L502X) that have a Core i5-2450M, 6GB RAM and a 1TB WD 5400RPM HDD.This notebook Achilles’ heel is the disk. It’s slow and I understand that if I do stress it to much, it lends to sloppy system performance. Multitasking is quite complicated with this disk.
The real issue, however, is that with Windows 7 and OS X Mavericks I always had consistent performance running applications in a queue. E.g. Opening an IDE and then doing anything else.
Since I upgraded to Windows 8 (and 8.1) I had issues with the disk. IO operations are much slower and the disk can easily be brought to it’s knees with anything that requires much reading/writing. Even ordinary tasks as opening a web browser are clearly slower on Windows 8.1. It the disk is being stressed by any applications, the entire system will freeze with disk usage jumping to 100% (even tho reading is barely at 4MB/s).
I tried many commonly internet found solutions as installing updated Intel’s AHCI drivers or disabling file indexing. I also tried multiple re installations. The situation remained the same. The system is very sloppy when it comes to disk.
One very odd issue is that Windows 7 running on a VM inside Windows 8.1 is still faster than the host system on disk issues! It reads and writes much faster and launching light programs beats the hosting system big time.
Any thoughts on that?
Answer:
switch to a 120GB or bigger SSD, and put the 1TB HDD in a external enclosure
- sourceswell my own experience with slow drives