G751JY: HDD takes some seconds to load sometimes?

[Evil_Hotdog]

Hi,

I'm having this issue since I bought the laptop 8 months ago, it's not really a problem, but still I am wondering if it its normal or not.
For example, when I want to play a song that's on the E drive (=not SSD) it sometimes will start playing for like 3 seconds, then stop,
you can hear the HDD starting to spin when the music stops, then after a short pause the song continues.
The Pause is 1 to 3 seconds long, sometimes only with one song, sometimes the next song will have the same pause, always in the beginning of the songs.
I did not notice this when watching a movie or serie, or playing games.

For all I know this might be normal behaviour, since I never owned a laptop with more than one HDD or SSD before.
HDD model: HGST HTS721010A9E630
I have BIOS version 202.

Please enlighten me 😛
thx

[Jon_G]

I have the same BIOS 202 on my G751JY-DH71 purchased 01/19/15. I immediately removed the 1TB HGST 7K1000 HD from the second bay before ever powering notebook up, placed a 1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSD in it's place via an SATA 3 6" extension cable connected to SATA 3 in bay 1 fed under SATA bridge to the SSD. I then put the 1TB HGST HD into an external SATA 3 to USB 3.0 enclosure and it shows up as a single, unpartitioned 32GB total capacity HD not 1TB?
Must be a bad hard drive I received with the notebook. Yours might be bad also. At least yours shows up as 1TB. Even though it's an SATA 3 7200 RPM HD it will only run at SATA 2 connected to notebooks bay 2 SATA 2 adapter, perhaps that's why it seems laggy or slow, compared to the PCIe M.2 Samsung XP941 SSD but you probably received a bad hard drive too.
I'm awaiting ASUS support answer if I can simply RMA the 1TB HD back to them for replacement without having to RMA my entire notebook that runs great, undue all the upgrades I installed including additional, exact 8GB SKhynix SODIMM to max system memory from 24GB to 32GB Dual Channel Memory. I'd hate to be without this beast just for a cheap, slow, crappy 1TB HD that will be for external storage.

[Evil_Hotdog]

I did a test to check the write speed of the SSD and HDD.
I used a file over 10gb big, these were the results:
SSD to HDD: first 3 seconds over 900 mb/s, after that around 110mb/s
HDD to HDD: over 1 gb/s the first second, after that about 5 seconds 100mb/s, after that it stays around 20mb/s.
when testing with another smaller file (7gb) i got different results: first around 100mb/s, few seconds later around 40-50 mb/s.
HDD to SSD: over 1,2 gb/s, after a few seconds drops to 130mb/s.
SSD to SSD: between 180mb/s and 500mb/s, with an average of around 300mb/s.

all speeds seem to be affected by the file size.
I understand HDD needs to physically write an read stuff on the hard drive so it takes longer.
Are these speeds somewhat normal? If not, can this affect the lifespan of things?
I dont know a lot about HDD and SSD speeds and qualtity, but I do know i don't want them to break after a year or so

[Prostar_Compute]

Have you compared your speeds with results from similar benchmarks posted online?

The song starting and stopping is a abnormal, but it's hard to say whether there's anything actually wrong with the drive or not. It seems more or less fully functional.

[joshindaphils]

Could be a mix of your music player and your HDD sleeping (spinning down). First part of the song is cached, music play's then needs more data so it spins up the drive (meanwhile your song stop) then the rest of the song is loaded, after a while the drive spins back down, rinse and repeat... anyhow just a theory but look into preventing your HDD from spinning down may be worth a shot either via power management tools or something that periodically pokes the file system. Google is your friend for various solutions.

[bartat404]

Those speed transfers are normal. When reading from teh SSD it's rapidly filling up the system write cache in RAM, which is faster than an HDD before it slows down to the real physical speeds.

As for the spinning down, and having to spin back up to read media, I bet that the system is putting the hard drive to sleep, which can be disabled in power options.