HDD on its way out?

bazzabear

bazzabear

bazzabear

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Over the last week or so, some games have started taking a long time to load up. Running fine once they're up though.

Currently Snowrunner is taking literally minutes. Looking at Task Manager, I found this... Oh, wait. Can't share pictures on here...

OK, so the disk drive is showing 100% use, but read and write speeds of zero a lot of the time. Disk transfer rate graph is showing lots of time at zero.

Does this sound like a failing HDD? Anything else I can do to check it?
 
Thank you.

Thankfully it is a secondary drive used pretty much just for game data, so nothing worrying to lose. I did the error checking and defragmentation analysis that's available in Windows, and neither found any issues. But very noticeable that the checks took a huge amount longer than on another drive also installed in the PC.

Daft question - my motherboard slot for an SSD is already taken. I assume I can buy a SATA 2.5" SSD and straight swap it for a HDD? Same connections, same fittings?
 
Yep, got about 200 errors in the 30 mins since I started up this morning. None of them obviously directly due to the failing hard drive (Kernel-event-tracing and DeviceSetupManager mostly).

Had 4000 yesterday!

While the drive is still working sporadically, I am either transferring or deleting games. The computer will remain usable while I ponder whether to use this as the (admittedly poor) excuse for a new system I've been hankering after for a while. :D

Steam does this brilliantly by the way, automating the drive transfer process. Epic is predictably rubbish and in the end I just decided to delete them and re-install elsewhere. Oculus I am about to find out - I suspect it'll be nearer to Epic than Steam.
 
I don't know enough to tell you any more than those two 'sources' I mentioned in my post! :D
Seems to be stuff attempting to start and failing, presumably due to a disk access issue.
 
I've basically emptied the drive now. It's just got all those stubs steam games leave behind when you install them.

Should I be physically unplugging the drive because when it fails completely it might have the system grind to a halt as it's waiting for some kind of response from the drive on start up?
 
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