Defiance Laptop EXTREMELY SLOW - HDD / Optane issue ?

[ubuysa]

Be fair - 'Up to 5' includes a lot of numbers BELOW 5!

I absolutely agree, which is why I warned in my previous post about the words 'up to'. SSHDs are a waste of money in my opinion, and especially those backed by 5400rpm drives.

1- misleading info on the website. (misleading SSHD perf + a bug in the form warning with optane 32G)

I already mentioned that the SSHD speed comes from Seagate and not PCS. I do think you have a valid point about not warning you of the Optane/SSHD incompatibility. I would suggest you point that out to PCS to help others.

2- lack of tests before shipping the computer (1-2 minutes freezes, and <300kB/s perf on system drive, computer basically unusable).

To be fair, you have no idea what tests PCS did before shipping. We know they do a soak test and we know (from other posts) that they don't test every port or feature, but there is no way they would ship a laptop that's freezing. Freezes in any case are quite often the result of wrong or bad drivers, incompatible software, and (in particular) slow disk drives.

3- wrong information was given by support (about RAM and M2 slots), they did not actually check my configuration before suggesting the acquisition of additional hardware, so I had to return the drive and Ram, as there is no more slot available.

That's a fair point and I would urge you to (politely) ask PCS to review the advice you were given. People make mistakes but to avoid those same mistakes being made again PCS need to know the full details so that they can put training and/or procedures in place to prevent it happening again. I realise you're annoyed, but you'll get a much better response if you are calm and pleasant when talking to PCS, you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

I had to buy a SDD, move system, re-partition.

Absolutely right. Given your initial requirement for 'super fast drive access' there should have been an SSD in your build from day one.

Current SSHD perf is still 0.8 slower than my old 5400 rpm. So that's actually BELOW 1.

I'm not surprised. A cached drive is only beneficial if most reads are found in the cache (they're known as 'cache hits'). If the wanted data is not in the cache (a 'cache miss') then the spinning metal drive has to be accessed. However, in the case of a cache miss you incur the additional time of having to search the cache first (and failing) so that the overall response time for a cache miss is worse than the response time to a non-cached drive of the same type. There's no such thing as a free lunch.....

 

[xXPhoenixXx]

I just received my Recoil II with a 1TB sshd and it's performing terribly. I refuse to blame the sshd as my last laptop had an SSHD too(Seagate barracuda) and it was quite quick, comparable to my desktop ssd. I also have strange fan activity with next to no workload.

 

[ubuysa]

I just received my Recoil II with a 1TB sshd and it's performing terribly. I refuse to blame the sshd as my last laptop had an SSHD too(Seagate barracuda) and it was quite quick, comparable to my desktop ssd. I also have strange fan activity with next to no workload.

How is it performing terribly? Under what circumstances is the performance bad? With what applications? With what mix of applications? With memory hungry applications? CPU hungry applications? Disk intensive applications?

It might not be your SSHD, it depends on what you're doing to see terrible performance, but we really need a lot more information to make suggestions.

 

[xXPhoenixXx]

How is it performing terribly? Under what circumstances is the performance bad? With what applications? With what mix of applications? With memory hungry applications? CPU hungry applications? Disk intensive applications?

It might not be your SSHD, it depends on what you're doing to see terrible performance, but we really need a lot more information to make suggestions.

Booting into Windows 10 completely takes way too long. From turning the laptop on to all the startup apps finish loading it takes about 2.5 mins, which is a lot longer than my last laptop took with the barracuda. Mind you, I know the way SSHDs work, it takes time for them to learn what apps I'm running more frequently to cache them, but even with a fresh install, my old laptop was way faster. Then when trying to play a game, the loading times take considerably longer than on my desktop barracuda. I installed the game at the same time so the learning process of the SSHD can't really be factored in. Doing a test on CrystalDiskMark I get much lower write speeds on certain tests than the test samples I've seen online on the same SSHD. Generally speaking, everything that involves SSHD is slow and using the laptop for a couple of days now makes no difference. It is as slow as it was after clean install. I've done a CPU and RAM test too, they are okay though still fall behind the average score of the same modules all over the world. I have a suspicion that its a motherboard related issue. I always had good experiences with SSHDs and they were never this slow, even in my 5 year old desktop and my 3 year old laptop that I had.

Game performance is not bad, though I have no real base of comparison, so even if it could be better I still wouldn't know. The only issue I have is with the loading time and the fans going wild when I'm just doing basic stuff like running windows media creation tool, browsing the web or doing a windows update. My old laptop only started getting a bit louder when I was playing games.

In any case, that's all the info I can provide for now, will do some more tests later.

I'd love to discuss these things with people who also own a Recoil II.

 

[ubuysa]

Can you check the CPU and GPU temperatures (I use HWMonitor) and post those here, both idle and under the biggest load you can?

Can you run a 'chkdsk /r' (without quotes) on the disk (all partitions if it's partitioned) and report the results here?

Did it come with Windows 10 pre-installed or did you install your own copy of Windows?

It would be worth running the Windows performance monitor to see where your delays are coming from. You can either run the real time Performance Monitor tool or, better yet, run the default System Performance Monitor. Click the green arrow on the menu bar to start data collection and then hammer the laptop with work - all those things that run slow for you. The default data collection time is 60 seconds so you don't have long. When the data collector stops (the arrow goes green again) or if you stop it early by clicking the black square stop button, you can read the report. Click the green book-like icon at far right to open the latest report. The simple traffic lights you'll see will show you which resource(s) were bottlenecked (if any) and the very detailed information in the rest of the report can help you find what's slowing you down.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Just a note, a seagate Barracuda isn’t an SSHD, it’s a normal 7200r HDD

 

[xXPhoenixXx]

Can you check the CPU and GPU temperatures (I use HWMonitor) and post those here, both idle and under the biggest load you can?

Can you run a 'chkdsk /r' (without quotes) on the disk (all partitions if it's partitioned) and report the results here?

Did it come with Windows 10 pre-installed or did you install your own copy of Windows?

It would be worth running the Windows performance monitor to see where your delays are coming from. You can either run the real time Performance Monitor tool or, better yet, run the default System Performance Monitor. Click the green arrow on the menu bar to start data collection and then hammer the laptop with work - all those things that run slow for you. The default data collection time is 60 seconds so you don't have long. When the data collector stops (the arrow goes green again) or if you stop it early by clicking the black square stop button, you can read the report. Click the green book-like icon at far right to open the latest report. The simple traffic lights you'll see will show you which resource(s) were bottlenecked (if any) and the very detailed information in the rest of the report can help you find what's slowing you down.

The system came with the Windows installed by the testing people, had to reinstall my own (Windows 10 Pro x64)
Here is all the info I have for now:
1. Comparison vs the same SSHD in a random youtube test video. (interestingly enough my read speeds beat it)


I've also done a test vs my desktop SSHD and a USB 7200rpm HDD. The desktop SSHD beats it by a big margin when it comes to read and write speeds, the USB HDD performed roughly equally when it came to read speeds, write speeds were much higher though.

2. Stress test of GPU, CPU with temps


The chkdsk failed, had to set it up to run at startup, otherwise it wouldn't execute and then it got stuck at 13%. Will try again later.

 

[xXPhoenixXx]

Just a note, a seagate Barracuda isn’t an SSHD, it’s a normal 7200r HDD

Yes you are right, I confused the names. What I have is basically an older Seagate SSHD.

 

[ubuysa]

When you installed your own Windows 10 where did you source the drivers? Which version of Windows 10 did you install (1703, 1709, or 1803 - earlier versions are no longer supported)?

Your temperatures are fine so we can eliminate that.

You do have to reboot to get chkdsk to run usually because Windows locks the drive. We need to know that the drive surface and file system is good as a first step so it's important to get chkdsk run.

I would run the performance monitor when you're stressing the system, and if you can recreate your poor performance whilst the performance monitor data collector is running that would be ideal. That will tell you where the resource bottlenecks are.

Can you also post your full specs please so we know what else you have?

 

[xXPhoenixXx]

When you installed your own Windows 10 where did you source the drivers? Which version of Windows 10 did you install (1703, 1709, or 1803 - earlier versions are no longer supported)?

Your temperatures are fine so we can eliminate that.

You do have to reboot to get chkdsk to run usually because Windows locks the drive. We need to know that the drive surface and file system is good as a first step so it's important to get chkdsk run.

I would run the performance monitor when you're stressing the system, and if you can recreate your poor performance whilst the performance monitor data collector is running that would be ideal. That will tell you where the resource bottlenecks are.

Can you also post your full specs please so we know what else you have?

The drivers are straight from my PC Specialist profile. I installed the latest Windows 10 I could create with the media creation tool and then ran the update (installed the PC Specailist drivers afterwards).

Thing is, I don't really need to recreate anything as it is constantly slow, it doesn't just slow down.

Specs are:
Chassis & Display
Recoil Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD 72 % NTSC LED Widescreen (1920x1080)

Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i7 Six Core Processor 8750H (2.2GHz, 4.1GHz Turbo)

Memory (RAM)
8GB Corsair 2400MHz SODIMM DDR4 (1 x 8GB)

Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 - 6.0GB GDDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1

1st Hard Disk
1TB SEAGATE FIRECUDA 2.5" SSHD - UP TO 5X FASTER THAN HDD!

It's from my order page, I just removed unnecessary information. I'll run chkdsk asap and post the results.

 

[ubuysa]

The drivers are straight from my PC Specialist profile. I installed the latest Windows 10 I could create with the media creation tool and then ran the update (installed the PC Specailist drivers afterwards).

Thing is, I don't really need to recreate anything as it is constantly slow, it doesn't just slow down.

Specs are:
Chassis & Display
Recoil Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD 72 % NTSC LED Widescreen (1920x1080)

Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i7 Six Core Processor 8750H (2.2GHz, 4.1GHz Turbo)

Memory (RAM)
8GB Corsair 2400MHz SODIMM DDR4 (1 x 8GB)

Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 - 6.0GB GDDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1

1st Hard Disk
1TB SEAGATE FIRECUDA 2.5" SSHD - UP TO 5X FASTER THAN HDD!

It's from my order page, I just removed unnecessary information. I'll run chkdsk asap and post the results.

It might have been better to stick with the Windows Update installed drivers rather than use the, possibly outdated, PCS ones. If you decide to do another clean install I would suggest you do that. I assume you installed version 1803? I'm wondering how compatible the PCS drivers will be with 1803....

Let us know how the chkdsk goes. I really would run the performance monitor data collector tool and take a look at the resulting report. If things are as bad as you suggest you should be able to see the problem in there.

I know you don't want to consider the SSHD as the cause but there is at least one other post on here reporting dreadful performance because of that drive and I'm pretty sure that's not the only one. It's an undeniable fact I'm afraid that a 'cache miss' on an SSHD results in a longer response time than the same read from an uncached HDD of exactly the same type. This is because of the time taken to access the cache on the SSHD. If you have only one SSHD drive for Windows/programs and user data then the cache will be 'polluted' by active user data files at the expense of slightly less active, but more important, Windows & programs files. The '5x faster' claim is probably true with ideal access patterns but I very much doubt you'll ever see anything close to this improvement in real life.

If nothing else helps then a clean install with the Windows Update installed drivers will give you the most stable software platform, if it still performs poorly after that I would seek PCS's help.

 

[xXPhoenixXx]

It might have been better to stick with the Windows Update installed drivers rather than use the, possibly outdated, PCS ones. If you decide to do another clean install I would suggest you do that. I assume you installed version 1803? I'm wondering how compatible the PCS drivers will be with 1803....

Let us know how the chkdsk goes. I really would run the performance monitor data collector tool and take a look at the resulting report. If things are as bad as you suggest you should be able to see the problem in there.

I know you don't want to consider the SSHD as the cause but there is at least one other post on here reporting dreadful performance because of that drive and I'm pretty sure that's not the only one. It's an undeniable fact I'm afraid that a 'cache miss' on an SSHD results in a longer response time than the same read from an uncached HDD of exactly the same type. This is because of the time taken to access the cache on the SSHD. If you have only one SSHD drive for Windows/programs and user data then the cache will be 'polluted' by active user data files at the expense of slightly less active, but more important, Windows & programs files. The '5x faster' claim is probably true with ideal access patterns but I very much doubt you'll ever see anything close to this improvement in real life.

If nothing else helps then a clean install with the Windows Update installed drivers will give you the most stable software platform, if it still performs poorly after that I would seek PCS's help.

Chkdsk hangs at 13%, I can't manage to have it finish. Doing a google search on it, I can see its quite common, though none of the steps provided helped me. Interestingly though, after a clean Windows install the system partition was 24% fragmented... like how? In any case, I defragged, Windows starts quicker now but I'm still getting the same abysmal write speeds on the drive. I used a third party software to do a surface check, no bad sectors and none of the hard disk diagnostics gave back anything. Later I will do a clean install again, then before doing a Windows update I'll install the PC Specialist drivers, then let Windows update update any that is outdated. Last time I ran Windows update first, a lot of the drivers were missing, so I don't know how much I can rely on Windows update fixing the problem. I'll have a look at the resource monitor later as well, though I already half gave up, escalated the issue to PC Specialists, see if we can work something out there. If it's the hard drive, instead of sending the laptop back, I'd much rather have a partial refund, post the SSHD back and use the money and some extra to get an SSD, though I doubt they'd agree to something like this. Life is so hard lol

 

[ubuysa]

Chkdsk hangs at 13%, I can't manage to have it finish. Doing a google search on it, I can see its quite common, though none of the steps provided helped me. Interestingly though, after a clean Windows install the system partition was 24% fragmented... like how? In any case, I defragged, Windows starts quicker now but I'm still getting the same abysmal write speeds on the drive. I used a third party software to do a surface check, no bad sectors and none of the hard disk diagnostics gave back anything. Later I will do a clean install again, then before doing a Windows update I'll install the PC Specialist drivers, then let Windows update update any that is outdated. Last time I ran Windows update first, a lot of the drivers were missing, so I don't know how much I can rely on Windows update fixing the problem. I'll have a look at the resource monitor later as well, though I already half gave up, escalated the issue to PC Specialists, see if we can work something out there. If it's the hard drive, instead of sending the laptop back, I'd much rather have a partial refund, post the SSHD back and use the money and some extra to get an SSD, though I doubt they'd agree to something like this. Life is so hard lol

I think before doing anything else you need to get chkdsk to run. Regardless of what other tools say, not having chkdsk complete leaves a question mark over the drive. I would suggest you boot the Windows install media, go into 'Repair My Computer', start the command prompt, and run chkdsk on your drive from there. That way the drive will not be locked and nothing apart from chkdsk will be trying to access it. If chkdsk won't complete from there I'd be suspecting a drive issue.

Contacting PCS is a good idea, but I rather suspect they will want chkdsk run on the drive too, so it would be best to try that first.

I really would strongly suggest that when you do a reinstall you do not manually install any drivers. Allow Windows Update to install all the drivers it can, for laptops that is almost always all of them. You will need to keep rerunning Windows Update several times to pick up all the drivers and updates. Windows 10 makes a very good job of finding the right drivers, much more so than Windows 7 ever did. That really is the most reliable way of ensuring you have the right drivers installed.

My gut feel at the moment is that your SSHD may be less than perfect but the only way to know that is to first get chkdsk run on it and secondly get Windows installed with the Windows selected drivers rather than the PCS ones. That way you will have the most reliable software platform you can get and if you get poor performance then it's probably a hardware problem.

 

[Tony1044]

I think before doing anything else you need to get chkdsk to run. Regardless of what other tools say, not having chkdsk complete leaves a question mark over the drive. I would suggest you boot the Windows install media, go into 'Repair My Computer', start the command prompt, and run chkdsk on your drive from there. That way the drive will not be locked and nothing apart from chkdsk will be trying to access it. If chkdsk won't complete from there I'd be suspecting a drive issue.

Contacting PCS is a good idea, but I rather suspect they will want chkdsk run on the drive too, so it would be best to try that first.

I really would strongly suggest that when you do a reinstall you do not manually install any drivers. Allow Windows Update to install all the drivers it can, for laptops that is almost always all of them. You will need to keep rerunning Windows Update several times to pick up all the drivers and updates. Windows 10 makes a very good job of finding the right drivers, much more so than Windows 7 ever did. That really is the most reliable way of ensuring you have the right drivers installed.

My gut feel at the moment is that your SSHD may be less than perfect but the only way to know that is to first get chkdsk run on it and secondly get Windows installed with the Windows selected drivers rather than the PCS ones. That way you will have the most reliable software platform you can get and if you get poor performance then it's probably a hardware problem.

I'd caveat ubuysa though to say that you might want to ensure you have chipset and network (both wifi and LAN) drivers to hand. I've had many a machine - especially newer ones - not be able to find drivers on Windows the install media and then not be able to download them because of missing chipset and/or network drivers. If you have both of these to hand on the same USB stick as you create for Windows, you neatly sidestep the issue.

 

[ubuysa]

I'd caveat ubuysa though to say that you might want to ensure you have chipset and network (both wifi and LAN) drivers to hand. I've had many a machine - especially newer ones - not be able to find drivers on Windows the install media and then not be able to download them because of missing chipset and/or network drivers. If you have both of these to hand on the same USB stick as you create for Windows, you neatly sidestep the issue.

Fair enough, as long as you are certain you have the latest drivers and ONLY if Windows Update does not install all the necessary drivers. It's not impossible that your poor performance is related to a bad, wrong, or out of date driver and the best way to avoid that is to not install any manually.

 

[Tony1044]

Fair enough, as long as you are certain you have the latest drivers and ONLY if Windows Update does not install all the necessary drivers. It's not impossible that your poor performance is related to a bad, wrong, or out of date driver and the best way to avoid that is to not install any manually.

Defniitely agree with you - it's just a real pain when you suddenly find you are sans drivers and have no easy way to get them

 

[xXPhoenixXx]

I think before doing anything else you need to get chkdsk to run. Regardless of what other tools say, not having chkdsk complete leaves a question mark over the drive. I would suggest you boot the Windows install media, go into 'Repair My Computer', start the command prompt, and run chkdsk on your drive from there. That way the drive will not be locked and nothing apart from chkdsk will be trying to access it. If chkdsk won't complete from there I'd be suspecting a drive issue.

Contacting PCS is a good idea, but I rather suspect they will want chkdsk run on the drive too, so it would be best to try that first.

I really would strongly suggest that when you do a reinstall you do not manually install any drivers. Allow Windows Update to install all the drivers it can, for laptops that is almost always all of them. You will need to keep rerunning Windows Update several times to pick up all the drivers and updates. Windows 10 makes a very good job of finding the right drivers, much more so than Windows 7 ever did. That really is the most reliable way of ensuring you have the right drivers installed.

My gut feel at the moment is that your SSHD may be less than perfect but the only way to know that is to first get chkdsk run on it and secondly get Windows installed with the Windows selected drivers rather than the PCS ones. That way you will have the most reliable software platform you can get and if you get poor performance then it's probably a hardware problem.

Okay, so here are the CHKDSK results (sorry for the poor quality pics, I had no printscreen available). To see the pics properly and not sideway, just open the pic in a new tab.
1. Main Windows partition:

2. Pretty much empty second partition:

After the clean Windows install, I let the Windows Updater do it's thing, when it finished I still had quite a few drivers unidentified, mainly: Nvidia/Intel GPU, Some chipset drivers, Some MEI (Management Engine) and Touchpad. (Also, I had to install Tongfang Game Center to be able to set up keyboard lighting)

For the Nvidia drivers, I downloaded the latest from the Nvidia website, for the Intel GPU I used the Intel driver tool from the Intel website, which also had a newer driver for the bluetooth too. For the rest of the drivers I had to use the ones provided by PC Specialists.

I made 3 speedtests, which are...

1. Right after Windows Update finished(with all the unidentified drivers still missing)


2. After installing the unidentified drivers too


3. Most recent test, after I spend some time browsing, installed some apps I use, etc


The initial and the second test is somewhat similar, the third one has some lower write speeds but at least I still have the problematic ones above 1mb/s. I watched some other firecuda tests online and some people have worse results than me, by far, some people have significantly better ones too, so it's hard to say what is going on really, but my 2 suspicions are: 1. The motherboard is bottlenecking it somehow and I might have to wait for future drivers (since the 8th gen thing is a rather new tech), 2. Due to the nature of the SSHD, maybe some of the other tests I've seen were taken in a different cache state and it might influence the standard read/write speeds. Booting up is still slow, but even if I put the USB stick in and boot from there, it's still slow, so I'm guessing it can't really be attributed to the SSHD.

Copying from and to the drive goes up to 100-110 mb/s, so that's about right for a 5400 rpm drive. To see faster loading speeds I have to let it learn and cache.

I intend to keep the drive and see how it does on the longer run and when I have a little extra cash I'll swap it for an SSD.

 

[ubuysa]

Those chkdsk results are fine.

I'm very surprised that so many common drivers were not found by Windows Update, I'm not sure what that means but it's unusual in my experience. It might have been better to get the drivers you did need fro the Clevo download site (http://clevo.com/clevo_down.asp?lang=en) . You might want to see whether any of the Clevo drivers are more recent than your PCS ones?

You're clearly still not happy with your performance, I have an uneasy feeling about this laptop too. I think you need to have a detailed talk with PCS about the performance you expected and the performance you have. You've pretty much done all you can to get the software environment right (though I am still uneasy about those drivers....).

 

[SpyderTracks]

Those chkdsk results are fine.

I'm very surprised that so many common drivers were not found by Windows Update, I'm not sure what that means but it's unusual in my experience. It might have been better to get the drivers you did need fro the Clevo download site (http://clevo.com/clevo_down.asp?lang=en) . You might want to see whether any of the Clevo drivers are more recent than your PCS ones?

You're clearly still not happy with your performance, I have an uneasy feeling about this laptop too. I think you need to have a detailed talk with PCS about the performance you expected and the performance you have. You've pretty much done all you can to get the software environment right (though I am still uneasy about those drivers....).

As it's a brand new chassis, the drivers won't be in the Windows catalogue yet, takes time to get them added, then once they're added, they'll be included in a version update.

 

[ubuysa]

As it's a brand new chassis, the drivers won't be in the Windows catalogue yet, takes time to get them added, then once they're added, they'll be included in a version update.

Really? In which case it's possible these issues are driver related and as much as I trust PCS, since there seem to be issues with this laptop, it might be best to get them from Clevo.