Hard drive's performance has become VERY slow? Wassup?

[NeilF]

I have an old Pentium system which has been chugging away for years.

Recently I've noticed it's performance has become sluggigh to say the least. It appears its down to the harddrive?

Trying to do anything in windows tends to be sluggish, and opening a new program is VERY slow. Booting up takes ages.

It's an old 40gb Maxtor drive running on IDE33 (NTFS/XP Pro).

Is there anything obviously I can do/look at? Scan disk etc all look fine. Defrag (which takes AGES) again seems fine.

 

[NeilF]

No noises, other than long periods of seemingly no activity (with the HD light still on).

In HDTach, random access made a good health sound and seemed to take a normal amount of time. Sequential was very quiet and loooong! Infact sequencial took over HALF AN HOUR to finish! Scary!!!! On the other drive (E) it took several seconds!

I have two drives in the machine, one is partitioned to C/D, the other is E. Here are the results...

Is there anything that can cause this scary performance? Seems to be just sequential that is suffering?

 

[NeilF]

I think its fairly safe to say its on its way out. Backup your stuff ASAP.

Can't think of anything else that could be problem.....is it running in PIO mode? Go to device manager and go to the properties on the drive controller.

Is it known for a drive to slow down like this before crashing? I would have thought a drive would just work or not!?

Seems to be in Ultra DMA 2 mode in device manager...

 

[NeilF]

Well, just put in an old 80Gb drive I had sitting around, and did a fresh install on it. MY GOD! It boots up in a few tens of seconds even on this old crate!

So I can only assume the old drive is having problems, and its sequential reading has just got diabolical! Amazing it's still working really!

 

[NeilF]

Have you tried defragging the hard drive or just seing its frag level anyway

Defragged! Perfect Disc'd it! All to no avail!

I'm currently copying stuff off the old drive onto my new one, but GOD IT'S SLOW! It's been copying my MP3 directory for over 12 hours!

When, I've set up the new drive, I'll reformat the knackered one and out of interest see if it gets better... But I don't think I'll risk using it again... I'll bin it

 

[NeilF]

Well I have heard of this happening before...anythings possible with computers

I'm just stunned, and EXTREMELY thankful, it hasn't just died.

I've not had a drive fail on me for several years or more. And if modern drives (well reasonably modern ish) battle on like this rather than just crashing, I'm impressed!

 

[NeilF]

All the drives Ive had fail gave some symtoms beforehand. I then took it out to have a look and it failed alltogether, doh!

What does speedfan say, its very easy to use

I'm still copying stuff off of it to my new drive.... It's that slow

Once it's all done I'll do a SMART via speedfan... Will post back

 

[NeilF]

OK... Here's the SMART results. Te first is the replacement drive, the second is the one with the problem. It does seem to show something!

It does rate both drives as having a fitness of 99% and a performance of 100%...

 

[NeilF]

lol
its non too accurate then. Its been turned off and on over 2000 times ? Thats where the wear and tear is then.

Im not too sure what those two attributes relate to but any problem is too much and Ive never had a drive fail on any count so I guess thats a confirmation of a problem.
Try a format anyway and a retest but dont store anything you want to keep on it

2000 times isn't surprising on a machine that is used most days, and with a drive that's quite a few years old.

On the machine in question I tend to have it set to power down the drives when not in use. Do you recon those power downs when the drive's not in use count?


The SMART did pick up those warnings with "TA Increase" and "Run Out Cancel"... Wonder what they are!