Advice on buying new HDD, to solve import-freezes

[Millusso]

I currently experience pc freezes when importing hands on my laptop. I play on UB, Everest, ongame and ipoker and the freezes occur on all sites. I have about 2M hands in my database. The freezes happen about every 20min.

What i did already:
-Using the newest beta
-Reinstalling postgreSQL and re-importing all hands.
-A completef format of my C drive, after again reinstalling everything with newest versions.

My laptop has an Intel dual core 2GHz, Windows Vista with 2GB mem and a 5400rpm hdd.

Do you think i can solve (part) of the performance problem by getting a new hdd? And if so which one of the following two would you recommend:
-Western Digital Scorpio Black WD3200BEKT or
-Seagate Momentus 7200.3 ST9320421AS

They seem to be the top of the line at this moment, accoring to this review on Toms Hardware Guide. However the WD is better at I/O performance and has fast acces time, while the Seagate has higher transfer rates. So which one would you recommend based on that?

#2 Western Digital’s new Scorpio Black has arrived with a bang. It has the fastest access time and great I/O performance, beating all the other 2.5” hard drives. Though its throughput cannot quite match the transfer rates of the Seagate drive, WD manages to get excellent results in all of the benchmarks. And despite good but not exciting power consumption results, we found some surprises: WD implemented a sensible power management solution, which has the drive consume the least power at low-power idle and when playing DVD video off the HDD.

So which one would you recommend based on this info, for use with HEM? And also, will a faster drive possibly provide a solution for the freezes?

[fabio]

I'm not sure if this solves you problem. Are you using any antivirus software? Maybe its scanning some files every 20 minutes

[Millusso]

No, no anti virus. It's not like there are steady intervals of 20 mins. It seems to happen less right after i clean up the database with pgadmin. Also it seemed to happen more often after my database got bigger and bigger. After I formatted and reinstalled windows it seemed to happen less for some days and also after a defragmentation it seems to happen less.

My laptop runs very stable with all other programs and never has freezes, only when HEM runs the auto-import, which is obviously very annoying while playing. I figured my harddisk drive is by far the slowest component, so if i replace that, the freezes might be shorter or gone, which might just make me able to not autofold all my tables.

Any hints are more than welcome.

[Millusso]

And also, which hard disk drive would benefit HEM/postgreSQL the most? The one with high I/O performance and fast access time, or the one with high data transfers?

[morny]

I dont think the hard drive is the problem with a PC of that spec on a 2million database when its lagging. Please try some of these steps which improve lagging situations:

http://www.holdemmanager.net/faq/afm...aspx?faqid=162

Im no expert on hard drives but if you continue to have problems after trying those steps ill ask Roy which one he recommend's might improve performance but id imagine the difference wouldnt be huge

[Millusso]

I tried everything now, except for moving down my hardware acceleration, since the Windows Vista drivers for a nividia 8600M GT don't allow that. (it's greyed out in vista).

Just a random hand, which happen on a daily basis, to show you how frustrating this is:

Hero: 9c 7c

Flop (board: Js Kd Td):

slypigdave checks. Hero bets $13. Villain
calls.

Turn (board: Js Kd Td 6c):
Villain checks. Hero checks.

River (board: Js Kd Td 6c 8s):
Villain checks. Hero folds. <-- folding behind on the river with the third nuts, obviously makes me puke.

Summary:

$2 is raked from a pot of $42.
Villain wins $39.50.
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It seems to me, that it's not a graphics problem, since stopping the auto-import function (but letting the HUD on), makes the freezes disappear.

A thing which you could do to help me, is make a similar guide like PT3 has for upgrading performance using a second hdd: PT3 performance tuning 2 HDDs. This might help my problem, and at least it will prevent me from spending another 100$ on a faster hdd. There are two 5400rpm hdd in my laptop installed, so i can try this. A guide will obviously be helpful for other people with 2 hdd's as well. So please, adjust the How-To on the PT3 forum in such a way, that it makes sense for HEM.

p.s. i can't switch to PT3 myself, since they don't support enough sites and the software/support is still crap, so please help me with this.

[morny]

Hi ill escalate this to Roy, in the meantime make sure you have the newest Beta http://www.holdemmanager.com/downloa....06.04beta.exe and also make sure you have UAC disabled as that can cause havoc with your imports http://www.holdemmanager.net/faq/afm....aspx?faqid=73