Hard drive problem - disk suddenly veeeery slow

[ntg]

Alright folks, I need your collective wisdom to sort this one out.

A couple of days ago my system response time started being extremely slow, to the extent that a simple dvdrip avi file would be choppy when played. This is inexcusable given my system spec.

At the same time, after rebooting (hey, it's the solution offered by all IT teams the world round) logging into windows XP was very-very slow. It took forever to get to the account screen.

I started suspecting something is wrong with one of my disks (2x1TB and 1x1.5TB). So I am preparing a line of detective tools to find the culprit.

I got HD tune and winxp error checking. I let it check all disks last night for errors (inc. surface scan) and it still wasn't over by this morning (not a good sign). A quick look via HD tune at the disk I suspect returned a problem saying it was probably the cable connection. I haven't done the full error checking through HD tune yet.

So any further advice on what I should be doing?? (well, apart from backing my stuff up). The only thing I installed when it started behaving awkwardly was acronis backup which I am inclined to uninstall and see what happens.

Cheers.

 

[PCM2]

Just backing your stuff up (I know it can be painfully slow on a messed up drive) and then thinking about what hard drive you're going to purchase. The rate of failure of my mechanical drives on home PCs has been pretty high. I have no regrets whatsoever after opting for SSD.

 

[ntg]

Just backing your stuff up (I know it can be painfully slow on a messed up drive) and then thinking about what hard drive you're going to purchase. The rate of failure of my mechanical drives on home PCs has been pretty high. I have no regrets whatsoever after opting for SSD.

Yeah, a backup is on the cards tonight.

I think the best would be to replace my 2x1tb & 1x1.5tb with a 64gb SSD for the OS and apps, a 2tb for media and a 1tb for backup. Ill have to think a bit about it.

 

[Ivyforce]

hmm...how about unplug the 2 drives and just leave the main one online, see if that is solves it?

you dont have a drive becoming full do you?
page file on a sperate drive to main one?

couple of ideas to check before thrashing the drive with several tools.

 

[ntg]

hmm...how about unplug the 2 drives and just leave the main one online, see if that is solves it?

you dont have a drive becoming full do you?
page file on a sperate drive to main one?

couple of ideas to check before thrashing the drive with several tools.

I think the problem is in my OS drive (3 partitions on 1tb)

No drives are becoming full.

Pagefile IS on a separate drive. Do you think that might be an issue?

 

[rpstewart]

Have you checked to make sure the drive hasn't just dropped into PIO mode? Are you seeing high CPU usage when you access the disk?

 

[ntg]

Have you checked to make sure the drive hasn't just dropped into PIO mode? Are you seeing high CPU usage when you access the disk?

~Yes I am!!

CPU usage goes over 50% whenever I try to access the drive. What do I do about that PIO mode? (perhaps acronis backup somehow is at fault for that??).

EDIT: Today's update. So I checked about that PIO issue and I sorted it out (uninstalled the secondary IDE driver, rebooted and it was automatically switched to UDMA). This made everything work perfectly so I'm happy. I'm just concerned on why it happened initially though; if I understand right it's supposed to be a result of faulty communication between disk-system so I might start taking some backups and keep an eye on the disk's performance. If anyone has any further input on this please advise.

 

[rpstewart]

Windows will drop the drive to PIO mode if it receives too many errors talking to the disk. Why these errors are occurring is the question - it could be as simple as an iffy cable or connection.