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Incredibly slow hard drive performance

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mamamui

mamamui

Joined
Feb 24, 2011
Messages
13
Motherboard
Gigabyte Z68MA-D3H-B3
CPU
Intel Core i5-2500
Graphics
eVGA Geforce 240
Mac
  1. MacBook
  2. Mac mini
Classic Mac
  1. iMac
  2. Power Mac
Mobile Phone
  1. iOS
I've come to realize that my Hackintosh tower, based on one of the CustomBeast builds, is experiencing incredibly slow hard drive performance. The drive in question is a secondary drive, a standard rotating disk, used for storing data/my home folder. My home folder is properly moved to the drive with symlinks, with the system files and applications on a 120 GB SSD as my primary drive. The system is phenomenally slow when dealing with anything that would touch my user folder, very specifically watching video or searching. I've looked around for an answer and have found nothing. I ran a few xBench benchmarks and from what I can tell the Disk Tests are yielding profoundly poor Random write/read scores (the Disk Test run alone yields between an 8 and a 16 while other results I've found give about a 54 or more.)

I'm thinking the drive might be failing. But there are no panics or complete failures, just really bad performance.

I was wondering if there is some kind of chipset/system controller kext or something I should have.

My system:
Gigabyte GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3
intel Core i5 2500k (stock speeds, stock hsf)
4 (2x2) GB DDR3-1600 RAM
120 GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD
2 TB Seagate 7200 rpm SATA3.0Gbps
Utilizing Intel HD3000 graphics on DVI port
Utilizing USB audio device
Utilizing onboard Gigabit ethernet
Slimline mATX case (well ventelated)
Asus Bluetooth 3.0 adapter
Unibeast 1.0 with Lion 10.7.2 and TonyMacX86 DSDT.aml

Acer B233hu 23" 2048x1152 DVI monitor
 
Thank you. You are indeed correct about that. However, now that you've mentioned it, I realize that the method you indicate is in fact what I had done. I had things confused with a, dare I say, Windows machine I had to tinker with symlinks to move the user folder. But on this, my Hackintosh, I did just move the home folder.
 
Not that this will help, but what SATA ports are you using for your drives? Are they all connected to the SATA 3Gb/s ports?
 
Of course it helps, or at least the intent is there. The SSD, the primary, is on one of the white SATA 6 Gbps ports and the 2 TB secondary used to be on a white port but is now on a blue 3 Gbps port. It was my understanding that the immediately previous versions of Multibeast and Chimera supported these ports and mostly that's been my experience.

I should have mentioned. The 2 TB drive chirps. Like little peeps. The best analogy I can come up with is that the drive is like a pool, and there's a tiny bird just pecking at it with the tip of it's beak. Just grabbing the tiniest bits. And only grabbing tiny little bits is kind of how my performance feels.
 
have you looked at Disk Utility and SMART status for your disk? you likely won't see kernel panics with a failing disk, especially if it isn't your boot device.

If the disk isn't dying then it's like a SATA port or SATA cable being bad, maybe try changing it.
 
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