HDD problems

snadge

snadge

snadge

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Joined
11 Oct 2010
Posts
551
Hi

My uncles HDD is a 1TB Seagate that is about 4-5 years old, it is taking ages to boot up and i cant fathom the problem? it takes well over 2 minutes from button to desktop, mine takes about 30 seconds.

the rest of his set up is old (but still usuable) though: Quad-Core 8200 @ 2.6Ghz / 4Gb 800Mhz DDR2 / Chipset GPU / Gigabyte mobo / Win 10

I have used PERFECTDISK as I find it to have the better placement algorithm, it places boot files contigously at the start of the disk, now i have ran a few passes, consolidate free space, defrag then optimize in order just for good measure and its still the same.

the only other thing of note is it will NOT perform a boot time defrag for some reason, i set it in PD but nthing happens upon reboot, and im wondering if some of the boot files in use are in the page-file which might be heavily fragmented...i dunno... the size of the page file is fine (Managed by system) changed that to 6Gb but still same results.

I used a SMART reader which respots health generally OK but has some concerning high numbers in certain readings

DESCRITPION - RAW VALUE

CRC Error Count - 1812
Seek Error Rate - 356377508
Command Timeout - 38655295514
Raw Read Error Rate 113624787
Hardware ECC Recovered - 113624787
Head Flying Hours - 204096845925773
High Fly Writes - 2
Reported Uncorrectable Errors - 5

no reallocated sectors....

could anyone offer any advice on this please?

thanks
 
those value means nothing, they are raw bits. brand new drives have huge numbers too. If the smart not reported anything then nothing had happened. The thing to look out for is unreadable sector.

best to do a screen shot of the smart reading.

anything wrong the SMART will flag up warning or error.

4-5yrs can be potential for the end of a HDD life span. but I have a 500gb drive that is over 10yrs old and it still works albeit, the last 3 years its been on a shelf.

boot defrag may require the PC to be booted in BIOS mode instead of UEFI mode and there maybe other setting in bios that affects the boot defrag also.
 
His motherboard is old it doesnt have UEFI, its a Legacy system.

yeah I should have taken screenshots. I will do next time im there, just chugs away for ages as windows loads

its a fairly old build I done around 2007, so the system is 10 years old, since its build its had a new HDD, PSU, DVD-drive, GPU REMOVED - FAULTY, upgraded from Windows 7 to 10 and recently upgraded the Intel dual-core 90nm to Intel quad-core 45nm and 2GB DDR2 to 4GB DDR2

the only things running at boot is Bitdefender free, Process Lasso and Ccleaner, shame cos I reckon if he put a new hard-drive (preferably SSD) it would be quite zippy, he really needs a GPU too as the Analogue he's using is picking up interference and messing with the quality of the screen.

Yeah SMART reported overall the drive as OK... next time I may run SPEEDFAN as ive just remembered it has a drive SMART check option that takes you to a website and gives you a breakdown of the SMART results, its pretty good actually

edit: I have a 9yr old 500GB that was a desktop Seagate unit dismantled after heavy use and put inside my PC, it has zero value figure than the ones such as CRC & Reported UnCorrectable Errors

Might try Spinrite on it too...

thx
 
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