SSD slowing down
Hello folks! I'm absolutely not tech-savvy and I could really use some input here.
I own a Lenovo Ideapad Y-500 laptop, which is about a year old now, but the hard drive has recently been replaced after it turned out to be broken right off the bat.
I have the machine back for about 2-3 months now and i haven't had any issues like I had before. However, the laptop has significantly slowed down in the past week. I've been told Solid State Drives aren't supposed to slow down, but a recent trip to google told me they can slow down if they get filled. However it still tells me I have 801 GB of 883 GB left in disk space, which makes me question if that is the problem.
In the past week, two things happened:
-I installed Steam and Skyrim.
-Immediately upon turning the machine on it went KRRRTGHT for like two seconds and then ran as normal. We brushed it off as the internal fan going bonkers. It hasn’t made the noise since and I highly doubt it has anything to do with it but I’ll mention it to be sure.
Everything else still runs as fast as normal. It's only slowed down on startup and shutdown. I run Windows 8.1.
I'm mostly just looking what causes it and what I could possibly do about it. Any input would be appreciated!
I own a Lenovo Ideapad Y-500 laptop, which is about a year old now, but the hard drive has recently been replaced after it turned out to be broken right off the bat.
I have the machine back for about 2-3 months now and i haven't had any issues like I had before. However, the laptop has significantly slowed down in the past week. I've been told Solid State Drives aren't supposed to slow down, but a recent trip to google told me they can slow down if they get filled. However it still tells me I have 801 GB of 883 GB left in disk space, which makes me question if that is the problem.
In the past week, two things happened:
-I installed Steam and Skyrim.
-Immediately upon turning the machine on it went KRRRTGHT for like two seconds and then ran as normal. We brushed it off as the internal fan going bonkers. It hasn’t made the noise since and I highly doubt it has anything to do with it but I’ll mention it to be sure.
Everything else still runs as fast as normal. It's only slowed down on startup and shutdown. I run Windows 8.1.
I'm mostly just looking what causes it and what I could possibly do about it. Any input would be appreciated!
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As 
said, that's probably a hybrid drive actually. You need to free up a lot of disc space in that case and that's why it's running slow. You need at least 25% free space and more is better.
said, that's probably a hybrid drive actually. You need to free up a lot of disc space in that case and that's why it's running slow. You need at least 25% free space and more is better.I think it was worded incorrectly! I have 883 GB of total disk space, and only 79 GB is in use. Sorry for the confusion!
The noise was most likely the fan. (An SSD cannot make noise) but your drive is over 96% full and that is obviously not ideal. I'd try to make some free space there - at least 10%.
I'm far from being an expert on SSDs but I know that Dan is, so I'll let him talk about that. But if yours is a hybrid drive and the regular HDD is going bad, you'll know it.
Mine (just a hard drive, not a hybrid) started going bad about three months ago (at which point my laptop was about a year and a half old, so it was definitely a defective drive from the factory) and you'd DEFINITELY know if yours was going. It became noticeably slower, it took ages for files to open because they were corrupted and the drive had to try to fix them before opening them, the activity light would stay lit solid for ten or fifteen minutes at a time while it worked to move bad data into spots that weren't corrupted, and my computer warned me (something about the drive being unstable and to back up my data immediately to avoid loss) multiple times a day until I turned of notifications.
So if it's running normally aside from start up, I doubt it's a bad drive, judging by my own experience. Like Dan said, my laptop occasionally makes weird noises when it starts up and shuts down, too, and as long as its functioning normally, I doubt that's a concern either
Mine (just a hard drive, not a hybrid) started going bad about three months ago (at which point my laptop was about a year and a half old, so it was definitely a defective drive from the factory) and you'd DEFINITELY know if yours was going. It became noticeably slower, it took ages for files to open because they were corrupted and the drive had to try to fix them before opening them, the activity light would stay lit solid for ten or fifteen minutes at a time while it worked to move bad data into spots that weren't corrupted, and my computer warned me (something about the drive being unstable and to back up my data immediately to avoid loss) multiple times a day until I turned of notifications.
So if it's running normally aside from start up, I doubt it's a bad drive, judging by my own experience. Like Dan said, my laptop occasionally makes weird noises when it starts up and shuts down, too, and as long as its functioning normally, I doubt that's a concern either
Yeah, its definitely soothing to hear all of this :'D this laptop took a huge cost out of my funds, I would feel terrible if it would break outside of warranty.
Oh god that sounds a bit familiar actually! This laptop only came back in May, after a two month time at the repair station (first for a faulty drive, and then after a build error - they replaced the drive, but didn't secure the fan enough) and it's such a huge difference. Before I couldn't install some programs (I thought it was Windows 8 throwing a hissy fit because those programs were built for 7 or lower), it wouldn't fully shut down ie. the light would stay lit, like with you, it would be very slow some days, it couldn't use the Restart function... it was pretty terrible. When it hit the shitter entirely it suddenly froze, hung for twenty minutes until i held down the button, would take forever to start up, hung for 4 minutes or so upon boot every time (along with the clock in the corner standing still) not reading USB ports unless theres something in them upon launch, the keyboard not working in some occassions.. hrugh. I was lucky I made a backup of my files the night before it went down.
Yeah, I wasn't too concerned about the noise. ^u^ I thought I'd add it in case it was related to it.
Oh god that sounds a bit familiar actually! This laptop only came back in May, after a two month time at the repair station (first for a faulty drive, and then after a build error - they replaced the drive, but didn't secure the fan enough) and it's such a huge difference. Before I couldn't install some programs (I thought it was Windows 8 throwing a hissy fit because those programs were built for 7 or lower), it wouldn't fully shut down ie. the light would stay lit, like with you, it would be very slow some days, it couldn't use the Restart function... it was pretty terrible. When it hit the shitter entirely it suddenly froze, hung for twenty minutes until i held down the button, would take forever to start up, hung for 4 minutes or so upon boot every time (along with the clock in the corner standing still) not reading USB ports unless theres something in them upon launch, the keyboard not working in some occassions.. hrugh. I was lucky I made a backup of my files the night before it went down.
Yeah, I wasn't too concerned about the noise. ^u^ I thought I'd add it in case it was related to it.
Yeah that sounds almost exactly like what mine did, actually! I couldnt update programs cause it would get stuck for ages and eventually quit with an error or i would have to kill it and boot it up again. I didn't have problems with my keyboard but sometimes it would randomly reinstall things when I plugged then in to usbs, which it never did before.
Hopefully you don't have to buy a whole new drive though. The good news is that they aren't difficult to put in.
Hopefully you don't have to buy a whole new drive though. The good news is that they aren't difficult to put in.
I don't think that's a solid state drive, given the capacity, as an SSD at that size would be well over a thousand dollars by itself. Likely its a hybrid SSHD, which is a teeny solid state drive and a normal hard drive. They work most of the time, but just expect it to be a slightly speedier version of a normal hard drive.
Ignore weird noises on start up. My laptops always do this too.
Do the usual things like clearing temp files and the like, and make sure you don't have too many startup items, as that causes a computer to take forever to boot up. Steam by itself shouldn't be causing any issues, and a game being installed won't cause any issues either as its not always running, so don't worry about it.
If you keep having trouble I can help assist further, but once again, nothing serious is wrong, I wouldn't worry.
Can you describe the kind of slowness you are experiencing? Is it slow operation, or taking a long time to boot up, or something else entirely?
Ignore weird noises on start up. My laptops always do this too.
Do the usual things like clearing temp files and the like, and make sure you don't have too many startup items, as that causes a computer to take forever to boot up. Steam by itself shouldn't be causing any issues, and a game being installed won't cause any issues either as its not always running, so don't worry about it.
If you keep having trouble I can help assist further, but once again, nothing serious is wrong, I wouldn't worry.
Can you describe the kind of slowness you are experiencing? Is it slow operation, or taking a long time to boot up, or something else entirely?
Yeah, thats probably it! Also considering this: 33.media.tumblr.com/e6b7fbe03f… I've been told the Lenovo drive is the OneKey Recovery drive. On the side of the laptop is a small button that lets me go into various things, and Lenovo's Recovery which lets me wipe out the C drive entirely. I've also been told that is why I can't make disk partitions, or install another OS, as that would screw with the Recovery.
The laptop nearly cost 800 euros on discount, and was roughly 1000+ euros off discount, which is about 1300 dollar? A lot of it went into a good processor and graphics card, as this is supposed to be a gaming/artsy travel laptop thingmajigger. Something like that.
Do you know the circle thing Windows 8 uses for loading things? Instead of taking half a circle, it now needs a full one or 1.3 circle on shutdown and startup. Thats what I would describe it, haha. Aside from that, it's still just as fast as usual and runs without issues. It's a little cranky after startup though, not running as fast as usual, but after 2-3 minutes its fine.
The laptop nearly cost 800 euros on discount, and was roughly 1000+ euros off discount, which is about 1300 dollar? A lot of it went into a good processor and graphics card, as this is supposed to be a gaming/artsy travel laptop thingmajigger. Something like that.
Do you know the circle thing Windows 8 uses for loading things? Instead of taking half a circle, it now needs a full one or 1.3 circle on shutdown and startup. Thats what I would describe it, haha. Aside from that, it's still just as fast as usual and runs without issues. It's a little cranky after startup though, not running as fast as usual, but after 2-3 minutes its fine.
that behavior sounds exactly like a sshd that has ran out of ssd space and is now acting like a hard drive again. I wouldn't worry about it.
However there isn't really a super easy way to fix it because there is no way to instruct the drive as to what you want to be on the ssd vs the hdd. I'm sure we could figure something more in depth, if you want~
Nothing is wrong, its not at the same HDD speed of a normal, HDD laptop. Not too much can be easily done, but nothing really is wrong.
However there isn't really a super easy way to fix it because there is no way to instruct the drive as to what you want to be on the ssd vs the hdd. I'm sure we could figure something more in depth, if you want~
Nothing is wrong, its not at the same HDD speed of a normal, HDD laptop. Not too much can be easily done, but nothing really is wrong.
If nothing is directly wrong with it, I'm not going to tinker too much with it :'D Thank you very much though! This was pretty helpful ^u^
If things do go wrong though, would you mind if I'd shoot you a note? c:
If things do go wrong though, would you mind if I'd shoot you a note? c:
you can ask any time for help with this sort of stuff~
You probably have new tasks running at startup since its only hangs up at startup and shutdown.
Steam and Skyrim.
If you have mods installed you are just increasing the potential of frying your motherboard.
Check the temperature, maybe get a external cooling pad for gaming.
Overheated parts under perform.
If you have mods installed you are just increasing the potential of frying your motherboard.
Check the temperature, maybe get a external cooling pad for gaming.
Overheated parts under perform.