Extremely slow laptop hard drive

[Dave Grey]

I have a 2.5 year old Hitachi DK23CA-20 (2.5" 20GB 2.5") that is
performing very, very slowly. Sustained reads in the range of 7-
9MBytes/sec, with copy operations falling to 2Mbytes/sec or lower.
Subjectively, this drive was not this slow back when it was new, but I
have no old benchmarking data to make an objective comparison.

Is this kind of performance normal given the age of the drive or has
something broken?


It's defragged, running in UDMA-5 and the SMART status is as follows:

---------------------[Device S.M.A.R.T. status]----------------------
Attribute Value Thresh Raw Flags
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Raw read error rate 99 50 001200000041h CR PR ER
Throughput performance 100 50 000000000FDCh CR PR
Spin up time 100 50 000000000000h CR OC PR
Start/stop count 100 50 0000000001C3h OC EC SP
Reallocated sector count 100 10 000000000000h CR OC EC SP
Seek error rate 100 50 00000000015Fh CR OC PR ER
Seek time performance 97 50 0000000007DCh CR PR
Power-on time count 55 60 00000014A7DCh OC EC SP
Spin up retry count 100 50 000000000000h CR OC EC
Device power cycle count 100 50 000000000161h OC EC SP
G-sense error rate 100 50 000000000001h OC ER
Power-off retract count 100 50 000000000017h OC EC SP
Load/unload cycle count 1 50 14BA6214BA7Ah OC EC SP
Temperature 52 0 0014004A0040h OC SP
Hardware ECC recovered 100 50 000000000002h OC ER EC
Reallocation event count 100 1 000000000000h OC EC SP
Current pending sector count 100 1 000000000000h OC EC SP
Off-line uncorrectable sector count 100 1 000000000000h EC
Ultra ATA CRC error rate 200 0 000000000000h OC PR ER EC SP
Load retry count 100 50 000000000000h OC EC
GMR head amplitude 85 60 0000000730CFh OC EC SP
Read error retry rate 100 50 000000000007h OC ER

 

[Bob Willard]

I have a 2.5 year old Hitachi DK23CA-20 (2.5" 20GB 2.5") that is
performing very, very slowly. Sustained reads in the range of 7-
9MBytes/sec, with copy operations falling to 2Mbytes/sec or lower.
Subjectively, this drive was not this slow back when it was new, but I
have no old benchmarking data to make an objective comparison.

Is this kind of performance normal given the age of the drive or has
something broken?

Way too slow. Should be ~30 MB/s on the outer band, and ~15 MB/s on
the inner band.

But STR depends on the program more than you'd think. I only trust
HD STR data from HDtach, since most so-called HD benchmarks issue
commands through the OS's filesystem, and actually benchmark the
filesystem more than the HD.

For a quick test, create a BIG non-fragmented file. Then use DOS
to COPY BIGFILE NUL. If the file is big enough, you can time the
COPY command with a watch, and calculate the transfer rate. If
the file is on the outer band, you should get fairly close to 30 MB/s;
if on the inner band, you should get fairly close to 15 MB/s; do not
expect high accuracy from this method. {If you don't have DOS because
you fell in love with XP, then run CMD and type COPY BIGFILE NUL in
the CMD window.}

By the way, file-to-file copy operations on a PC with a single HD are
quite slow; for large files, this is mostly because of the inevitable
seeks to get from the source file to the target file and back.

 

[Chris]

Try to find an old version of AIDA32 (before it transformed into
Lavalys Everest), it includes reasonable disk speed test in the
Plugins menu (missing from Everest from what I've seen). My Hitachi
DK23DA-40F ranges from ~24MB/s at the start to around 16MB/s at the
end in the full Linear Read test, with two spikes down to 12MB/s in
the same places every time.