WTF is going on here then?

-Hotplate-

-Hotplate-

-Hotplate-

Associate
Joined
1 Feb 2006
Posts
215
Help please.
I have two PC's. My main rig is pretty old now and I was seriously considering updating it, but after reading quite a few posts I am inclined to wait for ZEN4 now and do it then. My main rig is an i7-4770K and to be honest it still serves me very well. I dont play games that often anymore, but I am planning on getting involved with Back4Blood and Battlefield 2042 this Autumn. This rig has 16Gb ram and 1TB Samsung SSD. All quite old now. Also stuck a Gigabyte 1660 Super in it pre covid. It runs well and is on 24/7 as I use it as a PLEX server so that I can watch my own content when I work away.

My other rig I hardly use and is a real disappointment to me. I built it specifically to use with ZWIFT which is a cycling game (exercise basically). But performance is slowly getting worse and I don't know why.
It will not stay in Sleep mode for more than a couple of seconds. So I shut it down. But when I turn it on it is so slow. It boots up but any requests to do anything just take forever.
I've gotten into the habit of updating it when its not needed as if I turn it on and expect to use it I can't for a good while. I thought the issue was that the internet connection coming via a homeplug was an issue as the homeplug seems to have to come out of standby and retrain itself on speed capability.
But something just happened now that is causing me to think the HDD is the issue.
Its a i5-7600K with 8Gb Ram and GTX1070. The HDD is old. 1000GB of which 830GB is free.
But when looking in Task Manager to see what the hold up is, everything seems fine apart from the HDD which is showing as 100% activity time.
I've just updated the GPU Drivers using GeForce Experience, but it takes so long and some of the time the PC is not responsive. But if I leave it, it does get there.
Compare this with the i7 and the time taken to update that machine is as you would expect, normal.
There is nothing else installed on this Zwift rig. that is all it is used for. Even logging into game takes forever and it didnt used to.
I'm thinking there is something wrong with the HDD but apart from being really slow, I can't figure it out.
I'm not a novice. I've been building PC's for 20 years now, I'm just not that active at it anymore. Hence I am not as confident at figuring this out.
Any suggestions or advice that will make my second rig useful again would be appreciated. At the moment I hate using it as its so crap. When I do used it, its literally for 60-90 minutes and that's it.
Cheers
 
-Hotplate- said:
Help please.
I have two PC's. My main rig is pretty old now and I was seriously considering updating it, but after reading quite a few posts I am inclined to wait for ZEN4 now and do it then. My main rig is an i7-4770K and to be honest it still serves me very well. I dont play games that often anymore, but I am planning on getting involved with Back4Blood and Battlefield 2042 this Autumn. This rig has 16Gb ram and 1TB Samsung SSD. All quite old now. Also stuck a Gigabyte 1660 Super in it pre covid. It runs well and is on 24/7 as I use it as a PLEX server so that I can watch my own content when I work away.

My other rig I hardly use and is a real disappointment to me. I built it specifically to use with ZWIFT which is a cycling game (exercise basically). But performance is slowly getting worse and I don't know why.
It will not stay in Sleep mode for more than a couple of seconds. So I shut it down. But when I turn it on it is so slow. It boots up but any requests to do anything just take forever.
I've gotten into the habit of updating it when its not needed as if I turn it on and expect to use it I can't for a good while. I thought the issue was that the internet connection coming via a homeplug was an issue as the homeplug seems to have to come out of standby and retrain itself on speed capability.
But something just happened now that is causing me to think the HDD is the issue.
Its a i5-7600K with 8Gb Ram and GTX1070. The HDD is old. 1000GB of which 830GB is free.
But when looking in Task Manager to see what the hold up is, everything seems fine apart from the HDD which is showing as 100% activity time.
I've just updated the GPU Drivers using GeForce Experience, but it takes so long and some of the time the PC is not responsive. But if I leave it, it does get there.
Compare this with the i7 and the time taken to update that machine is as you would expect, normal.
There is nothing else installed on this Zwift rig. that is all it is used for. Even logging into game takes forever and it didnt used to.
I'm thinking there is something wrong with the HDD but apart from being really slow, I can't figure it out.
I'm not a novice. I've been building PC's for 20 years now, I'm just not that active at it anymore. Hence I am not as confident at figuring this out.
Any suggestions or advice that will make my second rig useful again would be appreciated. At the moment I hate using it as its so crap. When I do used it, its literally for 60-90 minutes and that's it.
Cheers
Click to expand...
Does sound like a HDD issue, is the OS installed on the HDD as well as all of your other programs?

If it is then i would try using a different drive and a fresh install.
 
Half way done you post I was thinking it sounded like a classic HDD issue.

Easiest option would be to get yourself a small 120-256gb SSD, nothing fancy and just re-install windows. For the £20 it's going to cost you it's a better use of time then hunting the issue down.

If it's still slow it's motherboard/data controller or could even be the cable, although unlikely
 
Copy your valuable files over to something else then do a complete system wipe. If that doesn't help you might have bad storage, or slightly less likely your ram is slowly degraded to the point its causing issues. But operating system first, then check storage and ram last.
 
Event Log may show issues if the cause of slowdown is the HDD failing. If activity time is high I would possibly suspect malware even if in theory there shouldn't be anything on there - if possibly give it a scan with Windows Defender and Malwarebytes or similar.
 
Try checking the SMART values of the drive for problems.

I would say in order of likelihood, IMO:

Hard drive FUBAR with unrecoverable errors. Bin drive.
Bad SATA cable. Bin cable
Windows/driver problem. Format and reinstall (but buy an SSD for your OS, FFS)
Weird firmware issue between drive and controller. Update BIOS, chipset/storage driver or bin drive.
North Korea crypto mining your drive. Douse whole thing in petrol and ignite
 
I would also install something like Crystal Disk to get a report on the drive itself and see if its got bad sectors. Usually gives you a health report as well.
 
It seems like hard drive issue to me. Prices of SSD drives are good at the moment so maybe you want to treat yourself with an upgrade?
 
I'm going with a HDD issue too. Its really old and the only component not to be purchased new when I built that rig. Thought it would be OK and it was for a good while. But the decline is steady and consistent.
I checked the Event Log and found a load of warnings due to an unexpected large amount of time required to write to the disk. The expected reason was hardware failure rather than OS according to the log.
Which also makes sense as reading from the HDD seems fine (boot up for example). Its writing to the disk that seems to hold everything up. Updating Windows or GPU Driver has gotten longer and longer to do. So I'm going to buy a 240GB SSD today. Only two things on that PC - Windblows and Zwift. Using just 45GB, so this will be plenty for now.
Thanks for your replies.
 
-Hotplate- said:
I'm going with a HDD issue too. Its really old and the only component not to be purchased new when I built that rig. Thought it would be OK and it was for a good while. But the decline is steady and consistent.
I checked the Event Log and found a load of warnings due to an unexpected large amount of time required to write to the disk. The expected reason was hardware failure rather than OS according to the log.
Which also makes sense as reading from the HDD seems fine (boot up for example). Its writing to the disk that seems to hold everything up. Updating Windows or GPU Driver has gotten longer and longer to do. So I'm going to buy a 240GB SSD today. Only two things on that PC - Windblows and Zwift. Using just 45GB, so this will be plenty for now.
Thanks for your replies.
Click to expand...

Could it be due to lack of space? Can you check how much free space is left on drive? It has happened to me before.
 
Windows 10 does a lot of background stuff these days - lots of small random reads and writes, that can easily overwhelm an old hard drive

Replace the HDD with an SSD and everything will be fine - something like the below should be fine, just use Macrium Reflect Free Edition to copy everything across (and it should shrink your current drive to fit)

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £55.69 (includes shipping: £8.70)
​
 
-Hotplate- said:
I'm going with a HDD issue too. Its really old and the only component not to be purchased new when I built that rig. Thought it would be OK and it was for a good while. But the decline is steady and consistent.
I checked the Event Log and found a load of warnings due to an unexpected large amount of time required to write to the disk. The expected reason was hardware failure rather than OS according to the log.
Which also makes sense as reading from the HDD seems fine (boot up for example). Its writing to the disk that seems to hold everything up. Updating Windows or GPU Driver has gotten longer and longer to do. So I'm going to buy a 240GB SSD today. Only two things on that PC - Windblows and Zwift. Using just 45GB, so this will be plenty for now.
Thanks for your replies.
Click to expand...

The warnings in the event log aren't usually conclusive with a hard disk because it's quite easy to overwhelm them with too much activity, just one app using the hard drive can be enough to make the system unresponsive. Task manager (or the more detailed resource manager) should also tell you which processes are using the disk and I would address that because even if you use a SSD boot disk from now on, a busy disk will use CPU time. The age of the disk doesn't really matter, hard drives can easily last 10 - 20 years and 1TB is a relatively modern size, so it won't be an ancient design.
 
Well this is altogether confusing. I picked up a 240GB Gigabyte SSD today. Went to pop it in the machine in place of the HDD and couldn’t find the HDD!!!
I was rummaging around in there when to my surprise I noticed an SSD!
It seems I bought new when I built this rig. 1TB sea gate Firecuda.
So I thought I could either carry on trying to figure out the issue, or install the new SSD with a fresh install of Windblows. I went with the new install.
Just finished updating Windblows and GPU driver. And I have to say the rig is fast and smooth. Download speeds where at max and install speeds where very good too.
No sign of the stalling / freezing / hanging I’ve been experiencing . So I’m pretty chuffed with the outcome.
But what of this 1TB SSD? How do I test it for “issues”? It would appear to be faulty whilst not failed. Also it really hasn’t had any use despite its age .DOM 24Jan2017
Any suggestions gratefully received.
 
-Hotplate- said:
Well this is altogether confusing. I picked up a 240GB Gigabyte SSD today. Went to pop it in the machine in place of the HDD and couldn’t find the HDD!!!
I was rummaging around in there when to my surprise I noticed an SSD!
It seems I bought new when I built this rig. 1TB sea gate Firecuda.
So I thought I could either carry on trying to figure out the issue, or install the new SSD with a fresh install of Windblows. I went with the new install.
Just finished updating Windblows and GPU driver. And I have to say the rig is fast and smooth. Download speeds where at max and install speeds where very good too.
No sign of the stalling / freezing / hanging I’ve been experiencing . So I’m pretty chuffed with the outcome.
But what of this 1TB SSD? How do I test it for “issues”? It would appear to be faulty whilst not failed. Also it really hasn’t had any use despite its age .DOM 24Jan2017
Any suggestions gratefully received.
Click to expand...

well the embarrassment continues. This isn’t an SSD , it’s a 2.5" HDD. What was I thinking. No wonder it’s a
 
-Hotplate- said:
Help please.
I have two PC's. My main rig is pretty old now and I was seriously considering updating it, but after reading quite a few posts I am inclined to wait for ZEN4 now and do it then.
Click to expand...

Sorry but what good did you exactly read about Zen 4 that is coming by the end of next year that made you "wait" for it?

Actually, it's the opposite - you don't wait for it for several reasons:

- it will be an APU;
- it will be the first immature platform on a new DDR standard;
- the wait to it is extremely long;
- there are very good offers today - 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X, for example.
 
-Hotplate- said:
Well this is altogether confusing. I picked up a 240GB Gigabyte SSD today. Went to pop it in the machine in place of the HDD and couldn’t find the HDD!!!
I was rummaging around in there when to my surprise I noticed an SSD!
It seems I bought new when I built this rig. 1TB sea gate Firecuda.
So I thought I could either carry on trying to figure out the issue, or install the new SSD with a fresh install of Windblows. I went with the new install.
Just finished updating Windblows and GPU driver. And I have to say the rig is fast and smooth. Download speeds where at max and install speeds where very good too.
No sign of the stalling / freezing / hanging I’ve been experiencing . So I’m pretty chuffed with the outcome.
But what of this 1TB SSD? How do I test it for “issues”? It would appear to be faulty whilst not failed. Also it really hasn’t had any use despite its age .DOM 24Jan2017
Any suggestions gratefully received.
Click to expand...

If I remember correctly Firecuda is a hybrid - hard drive with a small amount of ssd chip/s that act as a form of cache.
 
Last edited:
-Hotplate- said:
Well this is altogether confusing. I picked up a 240GB Gigabyte SSD today. Went to pop it in the machine in place of the HDD and couldn’t find the HDD!!!
I was rummaging around in there when to my surprise I noticed an SSD!
It seems I bought new when I built this rig. 1TB sea gate Firecuda.
So I thought I could either carry on trying to figure out the issue, or install the new SSD with a fresh install of Windblows. I went with the new install.
Just finished updating Windblows and GPU driver. And I have to say the rig is fast and smooth. Download speeds where at max and install speeds where very good too.
No sign of the stalling / freezing / hanging I’ve been experiencing . So I’m pretty chuffed with the outcome.
But what of this 1TB SSD? How do I test it for “issues”? It would appear to be faulty whilst not failed. Also it really hasn’t had any use despite its age .DOM 24Jan2017
Any suggestions gratefully received.
Click to expand...
Like said above, that sounds like it could be a hybrid, you can usually pull the model number from device manager or task manager.

You can run tests on laptop HDDs the same way as any drive. I guess an easy 'test' is to start copy paste some stuff and if it starts freezing you know it's something to do with the drive, or I guess, the driver or cable.
 
4K8KW10 said:
Sorry but what good did you exactly read about Zen 4 that is coming by the end of next year that made you "wait" for it?

Actually, it's the opposite - you don't wait for it for several reasons:

- it will be an APU;
- it will be the first immature platform on a new DDR standard;
- the wait to it is extremely long;
- there are very good offers today - 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X, for example.
Click to expand...
So there is no point to ZEN4 then? Better to upgrade now? I was looking at 5800X.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom