Extremely Slow RAID 1

[NPpain]

My Aging HP xw4400 Workstation PC has gotten slower every day. I recently got 2 500 GB Hard drives from my Dad's old PC. For most of their life, they would record an Hour, be watched, then delete that hour of movie. So, it shouldn't be expected that for being on only 2 hours a day, for only 3 years, that the hard drives take over 5 minutes to boot into Windows 10 on a machine that would take 30 seconds with an SSD. Why does it do this? I wasn't expecting an SSD experience with them, but 5 MINUTES? That's Ridiculous, even with their life. So, it has been written to completely very few times. Why do I get 10 MB Max Transfer on it and have it maxed out when the PC is Idle? Could it Be dying?

[oskarha]

Have you tried defragmenting?

[NPpain]

No, I Haven't, Ii'll do that right now.

[NPpain]

Also, sorry for the bad spelling, this PC has gotton so slow, that when I hit a wrong key, I just go with it, to prevent gfrom using spell check.

[HPWebcamAble]

Your RAM is almost maxed out, I'd guess windows is using your HDDs as extra RAM, which makes your whole PC slow.

 

Also RAID 1 doesn't speed up storage speed, if anything it slows it down.

[NPpain]

19 minutes ago, HPWebcamAble said:

Your RAM is almost maxed out, I'd guess windows is using your HDDs as extra RAM, which makes your whole PC slow.

 

Also RAID 1 doesn't speed up storage speed, if anything it slows it down.

Yes That is true, but 10 MB per second? That Is not acceptable. I know that RAID 1 slows everything down, but to 10 MB? I think I'll Just go with a cloning service. Also, with the RAM, as a word processing and very light gaming/streming unit, how much RAM do you think I need? I was thinking 8 Gigs, but that might be to much.

37 minutes ago, oskarha said:

Have you tried defragmenting?

Defragmenting helped a lot, to the point where I can actually type and have the words show up at the same time.

 

Also, would a SSD work better? I have SATA 3 ports and multiple PCIe Ports available, and if so, what is the cheapest/best performing SSD?

[oskarha]

1 minute ago, NPpain said:

Yes That is true, but 10 MB per second? That Is not acceptable. I know that RAID 1 slows everything down, but to 10 MB? I think I'll Just go with a cloning service. Also, with the RAM, as a word processing and very light gaming/streming unit, how much RAM do you think I need? I was thinking 8 Gigs, but that might be to much.

Defragmenting helped a lot, to the point where I can actually type and have the words show up at the same time.

Great!

Also, taskmgr doesnt give you a good represantiation of the performance of your drive, try running crystal disk mark and see if the results are normal.

[oskarha]

Also, the reason the drive is maxing out at idle, is probably because of a background service like windows update or defender hogging up all of your disk activity. Try letting your computer run for a few hours at idle to let these processes complete.

[HPWebcamAble]

1 hour ago, NPpain said:

Yes That is true, but 10 MB per second? That Is not acceptable. I know that RAID 1 slows everything down, but to 10 MB?

That is odd, it shouldn't be that slow

1 hour ago, NPpain said:

 I think I'll Just go with a cloning service. Also, with the RAM, as a word processing and very light gaming/streming unit, how much RAM do you think I need? I was thinking 8 Gigs, but that might be to much.

8 GB of RAM is the minimum IMO. 16 is a good balance, just in case. 32 is for heavy multitasking and video editing. 64 is just insane.

 

1 hour ago, NPpain said:

Also, would a SSD work better? I have SATA 3 ports and multiple PCIe Ports available, and if so, what is the cheapest/best performing SSD?

An SSD would be loads better, the Samsung 850 EVO series is great. Size is up to you, 256 GB is the smallest I'd want.