Hard drive dying? CrystalDiskInfo

Mr_DoughBoy

Mr_DoughBoy

Mr_DoughBoy

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15 Oct 2009
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Just wondering if anyone can give me some advice, I've noticed for the past few months my hard drive has been taking a while to load certain applications.

2 days ago I spent the whole day clearing up my disk / uninstalling applications / running chkdsk / then defragging the whole drive. The defrag took longer than expected (28 hours) to fully complete. After the defrag my PC now seems even more sluggish? Booting up to windows takes around 4 mins to load (much longer than normal)

I'm unsure if its just windows requiring a format or if the drive is starting to die. Bit confused on the results of CrystalDisk below, the read errors seem high but Im unsure if the drive is reporting this incorrectly as my second drive are also reporting errors and that drive seems fine.

2TB is my main drive and 1TB is the backup drive.

Any ideas?

 
You really should make the move to an ssd unless circumstances dictate but mechanical hard drives are only good for storage.

AN ssd will like going from walking to a driving a Ferrari, load times are drastically cut and pc is much more responsive.

Hard drive health reports good but not sure why it increased boot time sometimes a fresh install of Windows helps.
 
mickyflinn said:
You really should make the move to an ssd unless circumstances dictate but mechanical hard drives are only good for storage.

AN ssd will like going from walking to a driving a Ferrari, load times are drastically cut and pc is much more responsive.

Hard drive health reports good but not sure why it increased boot time sometimes a fresh install of Windows helps.
Click to expand...

I'm on pretty old hardware atm (overclocked i7 920 to 4ghz and a 1060) was planning on a full upgrade next year when my bank account permits :p but just a bit worried on my current drive as to why its taking so long.
 
those drives have been on for 5.5 years, so say 12h a day - they're 11 years old? :o
even if SMART is okay...i'd definitely be tempted to replace them already lol

and as always...back up, back up, back up
 
Mr_DoughBoy said:
I'm on pretty old hardware atm (overclocked i7 920 to 4ghz and a 1060) was planning on a full upgrade next year when my bank account permits :p but just a bit worried on my current drive as to why its taking so long.
Click to expand...
You can take an ssd with you to a new pc but honestly it's worth investing now, you wished you would have done it sooner.
 
mickyflinn said:
You can take an ssd with you to a new pc
Click to expand...

The difficulty here is that a modern SSD is M.2 and a PC that old not only won't have a M.2 slot on the motherboard but I believe won't be able to boot from one if it's installed in an adapter card because it doesn't have a UEFI BIOS. And certain adapter cards may require PCIE bifurcation too.

So it has to be an ordinary SATA SSD, plus a SATA HDD.

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £175.68 (includes shipping: £8.70)
​
 
Quartz said:
The difficulty here is that a modern SSD is M.2 and a PC that old not only won't have a M.2 slot on the motherboard but I believe won't be able to boot from one if it's installed in an adapter card because it doesn't have a UEFI BIOS. And certain adapter cards may require PCIE bifurcation too.

So it has to be an ordinary SATA SSD, plus a SATA HDD.

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £175.68 (includes shipping: £8.70)
​
Click to expand...
Not difficult really Didn't mention an m2 as the system is old just an sdd which still can be taken to a new pc .

Better to upgrade now than be stuck in the dark ages.
 
Quartz said:
The difficulty here is that a modern SSD is M.2 and a PC that old not only won't have a M.2 slot on the motherboard but I believe won't be able to boot from one if it's installed in an adapter card because it doesn't have a UEFI BIOS. And certain adapter cards may require PCIE bifurcation too.

So it has to be an ordinary SATA SSD, plus a SATA HDD.

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £175.68 (includes shipping: £8.70)
​
Click to expand...
MX500 is a much better drive than the BX500 and is currently the same price at OCUK.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/crucial-mx500-1.0tb-2.5-6gbps-7mm-solid-state-drive-hd-06g-cr.html

BX500 has garbage QLC NAND and no DRAM.
 
The 2TB one doesn't look too good due to the read error rate (raw values) possibly from power cuts or theres a mechanical failure (slowly dying). However the 1TB is still ok.

Best to get a SSD; this will speed up your boot times.
 
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in my experience if a drive is going to die it will cause your PC to lock up with crazy HDD light activity for a few mins then either carry on as normal or blue screen, assuming it has system files on it or a pagefile.

occasionally the drive won't initialize at boot and your motherboard will spend a minute trying to access it.
checkdisk will find errors frequently..


and there will certainly be drive error messages in windows event viewer like mine
CARzU9A.jpg


I don't think a drive can just go slow.
it's probably all the windows updates adding more and more crap and the amount of stuff you have set to load at start up

you can disable pretty much everything in task manager on the tab labelled "start up"


SSD are so cheap now anyway and would make your PC seem lighting fast

crystal disk info says my drive is good even though it throws up errors daily in windows event viewer
check the power on hours thats 7.1003425 years :D
PNC11F8.jpg


oddly I don't think I've ever lost data on it but it can completes lock up/disappear until I reboot
 
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Just to be careful I would back up any data prioritised against the room you have that you don't want to loose as soon as possible while you work on identifying the problem.
 
Those drives are certainly getting on now, numbers wise(in Crystaldisk) it doesn't look a great deal different to my storage drive (touch wood, still pushing along 7 years on). No HDD will last forever, so if you're seeing hangups on the system then start eyeing up a new one (it's pure luck if a drive fails gradually, so be thankful if that happens when/if it does), and for all that is holy at least get yourself an SSD just for Windows (a 240gb SSD is peanuts now, why not?).
 
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