Drive-dense system suffers from sub-par performance

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LANGALIST By Fred Langa The final LangaList for 2020 takes a look at a subscriber’s PC with a strikingly unusual configuration. It’s a high-capacity m
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A good thing to know given that many of us who do video editing have many many hard drives lying around. I probably have close to 15 on the shelf that I use regularly, but I don’t plug them in all at once.

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8string wrote:

A good thing to know given that many of us who do video editing have many many hard drives lying around. I probably have close to 15 on the shelf that I use regularly, but I don’t plug them in all at once.

What about backing up those 15 drives ?
Wouldn’t a NAS with RAID be a better solution ?

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no mention of the PSU wattage/rating on the PC in question?

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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I have 10 active hard drive partitions (on 3 internal hard drives). I also have 32GB of RAM. Desktop computer is Windows 7. My RAM usage also is between 16 to 17 percent (5 to 6 GB), even if I only have drive C: actually connected to the computer. It simply seems that the more RAM you have installed, the more that Windows will make use of it.

Some other thoughts…

The Windows disk defragmenter is disabled since I use a third party program for this task. The third party disk defragmenter app does not launch on startup. It is strictly a run only when manually launched thing.

Looking at Fred Langa’s post and what he quoted from the person who “thinks” that they are having issues…

The pagefile should be fixed in size — period. More importantly, the pagefile should not be heavily fragmented. This can occur if the pagefile is not created while in Safe mode and if the OS hard drive also is heavily fragmented. I have seen this issue dramatically occur with an OS hard drive (now replaced) which was having severe hardware related I/O issues such that the hard drive I/O controller was throwing hundreds of interrupts per second.

Running SFC /scannow can populate this folder with thousands of files, which must be properly cleared only by using specific commands at the command prompt, or by using a specific feature of Disk Cleanup. This specific folder is:

Windows\winsxs\Temp\PendingRenames

Never delete anything in the above folder! If you do, you will brick your Windows installation! The commands to properly clean up the PendingRenames folder varies with each Windows OS version.

Run chkdisk, on all drives, with no repair options. Even if chkdisk is run without any repair options, chkdisk actually does perform some cleanup issues for NTFS itself, even though no errors are reported. Occasionally this is enough to resolve some mysterious issues.

These are my personal observations regarding issues which I have observed in the past.

 

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[PKCano]

My new laptop has 16GB and 1TB SSD.  My map drives are 3 to my NAS.  The NAS has 6 – 10TB in a Raid 6.  I also have 3 map drives to my desktop.  1 is a 6TB mirror drive and the other is a 6TB (4- 2TB raid 5).  So I have 12 drives connected with 52 TB’s.  Reboot is about 35 seconds.  If you have individual drives go to a Raid system.  If you want an easy to use raid system look at Synology.  I have an 8 drive system DS 1618+.  I am retired and have a lot of photos and store a lot of my information searches.  I also like to backup my and my wife’s computers.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by PKCano.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by WSsmylrea. Reason: wrong numbers

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GoneToPlaid

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I have been looking at the Synology raid systems.

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The first Synology I had was about 10 years ago.  It was an inexpensive 4 drive unit.  It lasted about 5 years and failed.  I was a little upset about that and built my own NAS system.  It was a FreeNAS 8 drive unit with 4TB drives in a Raid 6 with 1 spare.  It was a nice system if you like to play with computers and networks.  It also does not like it when you are at 80% full.  That lasted for 3 years and i decided that I would get enough drives so I would not run out of space.  My eldest son and his wife had a much newer Synology unit.  They use it for their movie, music and game storage.  He is a senior programer for a local world wide company.  He likes the Synology because it is easy to use has a lot of programs to use the storage and is constantly being upgraded.  So I went with a DS 1618+ 8 drive unit.  The Plus because it is the commercial unit and was not that more expensive.  I also watched Amazon for awhile for when it was on sale or a very good used like new one came a long and got it for $200 less then new.  It may have had some scratches on it but had the full warranty.  I have 7 10 TB disks in it in a S2 type raid.  I started with 5 disk in a S1 because of costs.  I love it and it is very easy to keep updated.  I use their programs to automatically back up our 4 computers.  I am using 43% of the drive (11.3TB).

If you are looking to go with a NAS, you need to see what you want to do with it.  You can use it as backup for your computer.  Use it as another drive by mapping it to your computer.  You can also use it with the many other programs they have like a security video storage.  Then you need to think how much storage you will need and multiply by 4.  You want to go with Raid 5 or S1 because at least one of your disks will fail.  That will give you time to get a new one to replace the bad disk.  I like to have space to go to Raid 6 or S2 with a spare disk that will automatically replace the bad one and notify you. I also have space to add another disk if I start to get full again.

I hope this has helped.  Go to Synology’s site and research all the many things you can do with it.

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The Synology units use snapshots which can protect against ransomware – you will use more space but that is the cost of insurance.

cheers, Paul

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