Very slow boot time - 100% disk active time

I don't know if its a mere coincidence or what, I happen to have a ASUS x510UNR with the exact same hard disk and I have this same issue. I even got my HDD replaced from ASUS but the issue still persists. From my observation, this happens mostly when some process does I/O operations on a large number of small files. It feels as if the HDD's queue becomes choked due to the large amount of tasks (shouldn't happen though). I have linux installed on this as well and it also faces this issue when it gets an update or performs heavy I/O.

Funny thing is that once this happens, this continues to persist even after reboot, on other OS as well and goes away only if i give it some time and let it do what it wants to. I guess the firmware on this disk is to blame as I have seen people on forums having HP and lenovo laptops report same issue with this HDD. My firmware is SDM2 though.

I have the same issues with a brand new Lenovo ideapad 330s
definnitly an HDD problem
I'm cloning it to an SSD, will see the difference!
thanks all of you for sharing this thread, very intereting!

Yes it sure is an hdd issue. Just a few days ago, a friend of mine asked me to help him with his Lenovo laptop going very slow after startup. To my surprise, he had the exact same HDD model in his laptop and was having the exact same issue.

Also, a few recent updates from Asus seem to have fixed this issue for me ( didn't faced it since a month or so). I don't know what's the exact reason but I guess one of these two must've fixed it :-

1. Intel rapid storage technology driver
2. Bios update

Maybe this would help you and all others.

Sorry for bumping an old thread, but the reason of why the performance of this exact model of HDD "ST1000LM035-1RK172" is so crappy, is because is a SMR Drive.

https://www.seagate.com/www-content/...1602-en_GB.pdf
Extracted from the datasheet.



SMR drives are awful as boot drives, that is because of the way they works, for that reason is that they are used for the so called "archive" drives, where storage space is more important than performance.

Never mind

Same problem with a Lenovo Ideapad with this seagate HDD.