Corsair Link affects HDD performance

I've had issues with my file storage hard drive in my system for quite a while.

USB drives were fine, the two SSDs seemed to work ok as well (NVMe 950 Pro and 2.5" SATA 850 Evo). Hard Drive speeds always seemed to take too long, and after some investigation and contact with HGST I had the drive replaced.

I've now received a replacement, and I realized that the new drive behaved the same. Running HD Tune, the Read Transfer Speed would jump between all down to less than 1MB/s up to 170MB/s, giving a final average speed of 70-80MB/s.

After rebooting the computer in safe mode, running HD Tune I got proper results, so I rebooted the computer with my usual settings, and started to close programs down to find the culprit.

Turned out that quiting Corsair Link solved the issue. When I did the test, I was running 4.3.0.154, but I've now updated and I have the same issue with the latest version 4.5.0.55

This is the graph with Corsair Link running:

http://i.imgur.com/ZItkK2v.png

This is the graph after closing down Corsair Link

http://i.imgur.com/bwZTX3i.png

These is the spec of my computer:

Operating System:

Microsoft Windows 10 Home (x64) Build 14393.693 (RS1)

Processor Name:

Intel® Core i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz

Motherboard Model:

ASRock Z170 Gaming-ITX/ac

Video Card:

ASUS ROG STRIX GTX 1070 Gaming OC

RAM:

2x16 GB PC4-19200 DDR4 SDRAM Kingston KHX2400C14D4/16G

NVMe/(S)ATA/ATAPI Drives:

Samsung SSD 950 PRO 256GB

Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB

HGST HDN724040ALE640

I'm not sure what's relevant otherwise, but I'm running a Corsair H100i v2 CPU Cooling setup, and a Corsair RM650i PSU, which makes it nice to be able to run Corsair Link for monitoring, but for now I'm turning it off.

I'm not actually expecting this to be resolved but maybe someone else runs into the same problems, I couldn't find any information about this prior to my post.

Use the settings panel to disable the log file and see what happens.

The only way I can think of to stop CL4 doing the SMART polling is to rename C:\Program Files (x86)\CorsairLink4\cpuidsdl.dll, but this would also mean all the motherboard + CPU information will also be missing, but you could do this just for the test.

Yeah, I realized that It was logging by default but unfortunately turning logging off did not change matters.

Maybe I'll do some further testing when I'm back home tonight.

If you close down CL4 and run my SIV utility it will poll the SMART information every 10 seconds and you could check what effect this has. You could also set a per drive Minimum SMART interval so the drive get's polled less often. The Polled Count also get's reported on the [Disk Status] panel so you could check is there is a corrolation.

I'm running HD Sentinel at the moment to keep an eye on my drives, i assume that polling SMART info, but that doesn't seem to affect performance?

I'll try your strategy this weekend, thanks for trying to help :)

I don't know what the HD Sentinel polling rate is and it may be slow enough as not to be noticeable. I know SIV is at least 10 seconds and I think CL4 (CPUID SDK) is every 5 seconds.

Which driver/service are you using? The SIV [sMART Drives] panel reports this.

It's also possible that if you run two utilities that poll the SMART data that the issue will more then twice as bad.

I downloaded SIV (Your link didn't work btw) and I saw a performance dip, although not as bad as the one I get with C-Link. I also realized that Seagates Dashboard-app for backups also does a pretty hard SMART polling, which also causes a performance hit.

Never looked for which driver/service I use.

I downloaded SIV (Your link didn't work btw) and I saw a performance dip.

It looks like to forgot to past the actual URL in, now fixed.

If you want a smaller dip then just set a longer minimum SMART time.

In general it seems SMART polling is going to cause this and all that can be done is to poll less often.

I'm going to go with no dip :) Corsair Link remains uninstalled for now.

Thanks for your help!