Very slow HDD - intermittent but often

Hello,

I'm trying to diagnose an issue with the performance of the secondary drive on my PC which I've had since not long after building it. The symptoms are as follows:

Steam is currently updating a game installed on that drive, active time is 100% (and stays there), average response time is 300-2000ms and read/write speeds are 1.1mb/s or less.

Rebooting usually resolves issues for a number of minutes. It feels as though the drive only goes slow if I don't use it for a while, but take that one with a pinch of salt as it's not something I've proved.

The drive was originally a Seagate 1Tb 7200rpm 64mb cache 6gb/s effort. I started by suspecting something wrong with the drive. All SMART tests passed with flying colours. I downloaded the SeaTools utility and a 'Short Generic' test took 6 hours 24 minutes. It passed with no errors or warnings. I rebooted the PC, tried the test again and it took 1 minute 2 seconds.

The easiest thing to try was replacing the drive, so I ordered a Toshiba 1tb 7200rpm effort. Unfortunately that arrived faulty, but whilst it was being replaced I was able to try different SATA cables and ports with no success.

When the replacement arrived I put it in and copied all the data across, then swapped the drive letters around to make that my 'D' drive as the Seagate was.

Now it's displaying the same issues as the Seagate was, and the Seagate is performing fine.

The motherboard is an ASUS Z170-A. The OS is Windows 10 Home and sits on an SSD which has no performance issues.

All of my googling hasn't delivered the trumps but as the last PC I build involved jumpers, masters and slaves it may just be I don't know what I need to search for.

Can someone point me in the right direction at all?

Cheers...

Forgot to mention, disk drive is using 141gb of the 931gb available, so it's not even close to full. Always reports 0% defragmentation

Have you got write caching turned off?

Write caching is enabled on both drives. Should it be? It reads like it should be

Windows Defender is constantly looking at the D drive (it's mucking around in the Visual Studio installation at the moment), I wonder if it's that. It's not saying it's doing a scan, but something might be triggering it to be constantly looking at the drive. I'll kick off a full scan, see if it settles down after that.

Just checked on the PC before going to bed... it's just under 6 hours in and not at half way yet. I can barely hear the HDD at all and it doesn't sound like it's up to much. I can access the F drive and hear that HDD fine.

I'd already disabled powering the drives down with inactivity so it's not a case of it going to sleep I don't think.

So I've got two similar drives with the same data on them. When you swap the assignment around, the problem follows the drive letter (D) rather than the physical drive.

I might update the Steam game installs to get them from the F drive, see if the problem follows that (although Steam isn't running, it's just an easy thing to try).

ThisNameIsInUse said:

it's just under 6 hours in and not at half way yet.

Click to expand...

16 hours in and barely moved a few pixels in that 10 hours. I can't remember the exact number of items scanned, but it's managed around 100,000 in 10 hours.

Read speed rarely troubles 100kb/s, average response time around 1000m/s.

MsMpEng.exe and System are the only things accessing the drive.

If the issue replicated on a new drive after you clone across, the issue is software, not hardware.

Swap both drives to new sata ports to eliminate one possible issue as well as swapping sata cables, then format both drives and do a windows reinstall.

What are your storage controller(s) set to in BIOS?

Probably a faulty disk.

Open up Event Viewer, go to System tab, then filter by 'disk, Disk' ,post a screenshot of what it says.