Dying drive? Very slow operations.

Rainmaker

Rainmaker

Rainmaker

Soldato
Joined
18 Aug 2007
Posts
9,956
Location
Liverpool
I have a quick question about my hdd. Hopefully someone will be able to add something useful as this is driving me mad. My rig is as follows:

Gigabyte EP45-UD3LR mobo, E8600 currently @ stock, 2x 2GB OCZ Reaper HPC PC8500 RAM, XFX GeForce 8600GT, Seagate SATA2 3Gbps 500GB hdd (32MB cache, 7200rpm - model# ST3500320AS). Running Windows 7 x64 Ultimate with all drivers updated from the manufacturer's site.

The drive has never been particularly good, is quite clicky/noisy intermittently, and basically although it's survived a good three years now it has never inspired confidence. Lately when using Newsleecher, the PAR2 repairs are taking longer and longer, and the UNRARing is taking almost forever. On a good day, with a small AVI file, it will unrar them at a stated 80MB/sec or so; sometimes even more. However when unraring larger files, it will take aaaaaggges, and Newsleecher says it's unraring at around 15MB/sec to 20MB/sec.

This figure seems to be getting slower and slower every time I use it. :mad: I've tried other clients with equally slow results, so I have pretty much ruled out software. I also recently spruced up my build (swapping out the mobo for a new one etc) so I have new SATA cables in there and the performance remains as dull as ever - i.e. I can effectively rule out SATA cables or ports as it's continued across rebuilds. I've even upgraded the firmware on the hdd and that didn't help either. Normal CPU and RAM based operations fly along, so I'm pretty sure they're not at fault.

Could my hdd be dying, or just rubbish?

I've got all the latest chipset, SATA and other drivers installed direct from Gigabyte and everything else seems fine. This is really starting to annoy me now! Although it's not the end of the world, I built a PC for my mate for less than £300 of parts from OcUK last week and his seems very much faster than mine. Given his hardware is about three generations older, and he has only a quarter of my RAM, that surely can't be right! The only difference is I bought him a WD Caviar Green - again making me think my hdd is just pants and is killing my performance.

Any ideas please guys? :(
 
This is all Double Dutch to me, but it seems OK? Certainly nothing that I can see to show why disc operations are as slow as 15MB/sec and take so long.

hdtune-read.png

hdtune-health.png

hdtune-filebenchmark.png


Any ideas? :)
 
That hard drive is due to fail soon as it's run out of sectors to reallocate, in short, the drive has bad sectors and could well be slowing it down as the drive attempts to write and cannot.

Get a new HDD asap, and backup what you have on that drive.
 
PiKe said:
That hard drive is due to fail soon as it's run out of sectors to reallocate, in short, the drive has bad sectors and could well be slowing it down as the drive attempts to write and cannot.

Get a new HDD asap, and backup what you have on that drive.
Click to expand...

Ah. Thanks for confirming that, as I said I have no idea about drives etc. :) I'm actually pretty pleased, because at least now I know there's a reason for it and I'm not just going mental. :p My stuff's already backed up to my FTP server, so I'll grab a new drive ASAP.

Many thanks again guys.
 
PiKe said:
WD Green are not performance drives btw but they're no slouch either.
Click to expand...

Yeah I know that, my mate basically wanted the best rig in the universe for <£300. LOL The WD Green seemed the best drive at the price point, especially since he only wanted a web/email/IM type rig, so I snagged that. I only mentioned it because his seemed to run so much better than mine, despite being an 'economical' type drive on low end hardware.

I'm thinking I finally have an excuse for 2x 1TB WD Caviar Blacks or Sammy F3s in RAID0. :D
 
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