HDD on its way out?

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?
 

darael

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It does sound as though it might be on it's last legs. If you have anything important stored on the drive, transfer it off now. Anything else you can grab after that is a bonus.

CrystalDiskInfo can be used to determine the drive's health. If you're not sure, upload a screenshot to an image hosting site (I use ImgBB) and paste the image URL in the box that appears when you click on Insert image when posting.

To be honest, the slow transfers alone would be a red flag alone that something is amiss and perhaps the drive has weak or bad sectors. Ideally replace the drive with an SSD.
 

bazzabear

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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?
 

darael

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bazzabear said:
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?
Click to expand...
Yeah, providing it's a SATA power cable and data cable, then you should have no problems. If you use a 4-pin molex connector to power the hard drive, then you'll need to use a SATA power connector from your PSU or a 4-pin to SATA power connector.

bazzabear said:
Here's the CrystalDisk result. Clearly an issue, but beyond me what the details actually mean!

ibb.co

Screenshot-2024-01-06-225913 hosted at ImgBB

Image Screenshot-2024-01-06-225913 hosted in ImgBB
ibb.co ibb.co

(The insert image button refused to work!)
Click to expand...
You've almost certainly bad/weak sectors on that Seagate drive. In my experience it's the end of the road for hard drives with bad or weak sectors - I find the number can grow, either quickly or slowly, depending on your luck and fate. ;)

When uploading to ImgBB, I always right click the uploaded image in Firefox and select Copy Image Link and paste this in into the box that requests the image URL. If you use Chrome, I'm sure there will be a similar option when you right click the image.
 

bazzabear

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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.
 

Murphy

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bazzabear said:
None of them obviously directly due to the failing hard drive (Kernel-event-tracing and DeviceSetupManager mostly).
Click to expand...
Out of interest what are they then? I ask because it should be fairly obvious that they are related to a failing HDD, things like the source being 'disk' and/or 'NTFS'.
 

bazzabear

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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.
 

GR63

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HD Sentinel can be used to test weak sectors etc.. and monitor health in realtime... Only $20 for a licence if you want more features too. I bought it and the support from Dev is fantastic
 

bazzabear

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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?
 

tamzzy

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bazzabear said:
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?
Click to expand...
yes, unplug the sata cable at minimum
honestly should just remove the drive and chuck it in the electronics waste, it's basically useless
 
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