Hard drive speed issues

[Aditya Kumar]

Hi,

I have a Seagate 7200 SATA 250 GB Hard drive. It is almost two years
old. The problem I am facing is that sometimes the hard drive gives me
really slow reading and writing speed. The extreme case was when it
was giving me less than 1MB/S (Megabyte per sec) writing speed but
that was only once. I used a diagnosis utility and according to it,
the 80 GB SATA Hard drive regularly should benchmark more than 30 MB/S
as writing speed. True to the claim, last week my hard disk has
clocked 31MB/S too... but at times it appears really slow. Just
yesterday it was clocking in the range of 15-17 MB/S...However this
did not reflect any problems in using Windows.. it went on the
usual..but I am concerned why is this change in the speed of the hard
drive for no reason. I have defragmented it, I have reinstalled the OS
so I am certain that this is not a software issue.

Is my hard drive dying? Should I just buy a new one?

Please advise. I really could do with some opinions.

Thank you,

Aditya

 

[Paul]

Hi,

I have a Seagate 7200 SATA 250 GB Hard drive. It is almost two years
old. The problem I am facing is that sometimes the hard drive gives me
really slow reading and writing speed. The extreme case was when it
was giving me less than 1MB/S (Megabyte per sec) writing speed but
that was only once. I used a diagnosis utility and according to it,
the 80 GB SATA Hard drive regularly should benchmark more than 30 MB/S
as writing speed. True to the claim, last week my hard disk has
clocked 31MB/S too... but at times it appears really slow. Just
yesterday it was clocking in the range of 15-17 MB/S...However this
did not reflect any problems in using Windows.. it went on the
usual..but I am concerned why is this change in the speed of the hard
drive for no reason. I have defragmented it, I have reinstalled the OS
so I am certain that this is not a software issue.

Is my hard drive dying? Should I just buy a new one?

Please advise. I really could do with some opinions.

Thank you,

Aditya

Download a copy of HDTune (if you haven't already).

http://www.hdtune.com/hdtune_255.exe

The "benchmark" tab, shows overall transfer performance.

The "Info" tab shows "supported" and "active" transfer modes.
You'd want that to mention UDMA for example (mine does for
my IDE ribbon cable drives).

The "Health" tab accesses the SMART statistics on the hard
drive. Are any of the statistics showing a failure condition ?

The "Error Scan" provides a way to read all the sectors.
The color of the blocks on the screen, shows the status.

*******

If you need another test, Seagate offers free diagnostic programs.
I have a Seatools for DOS floppy diskette, that I use occasionally.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/

HTH,
Paul

 

[Aditya Kumar]

Download a copy of HDTune (if you haven't already).

http://www.hdtune.com/hdtune_255.exe

The "benchmark" tab, shows overall transfer performance.

The "Info" tab shows "supported" and "active" transfer modes.
You'd want that to mention UDMA for example (mine does for
my IDE ribbon cable drives).

The "Health" tab accesses the SMART statistics on the hard
drive. Are any of the statistics showing a failure condition ?

The "Error Scan" provides a way to read all the sectors.
The color of the blocks on the screen, shows the status.

*******

If you need another test, Seagate offers free diagnostic programs.
I have a Seatools for DOS floppy diskette, that I use occasionally.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/

HTH,
      Paul

Paul,

Thanks for this. No, I haven't used hdtune yet, I didn't know it
existed. I am at work now, so once I am home I will do this first
thing and would post the results here. Thanks for your message again,
guess it would prove to be of much help!

Thanks,
Aditya

 

[Steve]

Hi,

I have a Seagate 7200 SATA 250 GB Hard drive. It is almost two years
old. The problem I am facing is that sometimes the hard drive gives me
really slow reading and writing speed. The extreme case was when it
was giving me less than 1MB/S (Megabyte per sec) writing speed but
that was only once. I used a diagnosis utility and according to it,
the 80 GB SATA Hard drive regularly should benchmark more than 30 MB/S
as writing speed. True to the claim, last week my hard disk has
clocked 31MB/S too... but at times it appears really slow. Just
yesterday it was clocking in the range of 15-17 MB/S...However this
did not reflect any problems in using Windows.. it went on the
usual..but I am concerned why is this change in the speed of the hard
drive for no reason. I have defragmented it, I have reinstalled the OS
so I am certain that this is not a software issue.

Is my hard drive dying? Should I just buy a new one?

Please advise. I really could do with some opinions.

Thank you,

Aditya

The standard Windows defragmenting utility is pretty useless, it defrags but
leaves the files still scattered everywhere so you rarely get much of a
speed up as the HD head has to whizz about all over the place. If you use
JKDefrag it will defrag AND move all the files neatly to the fast end of the
disk which can be twice as quick as the slow end. JKDefrag is free and best
used with the also free JKDefragGUI to make it easier to use. I just
defragged a <2yr old HP laptop (not mine) that was in a right state and
desperately slow, the Win defrag tool sped up loading programs by 10-20%
max, but JKDefrag sped it up by a factor of 2 on the slowest to load
programs.

One other thing to check in Device Manager is that the drive controller
hasn't gone into PIO mode.

 

[Aditya Kumar]

In addition to what others suggested, check Windows Event
Viewer for reports of a drive problem.  Sometimes
progressively failing drives will keep working for awhile
but have strange dropouts periodically.

@all,

I ran HD Tune pro. The mode is set to UDMA and the health status is
overall "OK". But here's the thing. I ran the Error Scan and there are
4 red boxes there. What are these, "bad sectors"? Each block is of 95
MB.

Do you think this is the problem? What should I do now?

Thanks for your responses....

Aditya

 

[Paul]

@all,

I ran HD Tune pro. The mode is set to UDMA and the health status is
overall "OK". But here's the thing. I ran the Error Scan and there are
4 red boxes there. What are these, "bad sectors"? Each block is of 95
MB.

Do you think this is the problem? What should I do now?

Thanks for your responses....

Aditya

Make sure your valuable personal data is backed up ?
Do you at least have a copy of your email database
file, and any personal data files ?

*******

The red blocks mean the scan found CRC errors. At least
one sector in the 95MB, must have been bad. If one of your
personal data files was stored there, the file would be
corrupted. Depending on the file type, the blemish might
not be too serious, or it could be catastrophic (file
becomes unusable). In the worst case, the computer
might not be able to boot from the drive any more.

The bad sectors, could also be in an area of the disk,
where no file is currently stored. If that is the case,
then no harm done (for now).

I replace hard drives at regular intervals, and usually
before they get that bad. A new hard drive, in USD,
costs from $40 to $100, and is cheaper than paying
a data recovery firm $500 to $1000, to try to get
back lost data. On average, I buy two new hard
drives per year, and my storage requirements are
pretty modest (no video or music collection).

To move data from the old drive to the new, Seagate
offers DiscWizard if you buy one of their drives.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=d9fd4a3cdde5c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

I move data using Linux "dd". If there are red blocks
showing, then I'd have to use something like
"dd_rescue", to skip over the bad blocks.

The overall transfer, using that "dd" method, could be
quite slow. The DiscWizard is a file by file
transfer, and should go faster. I cannot
predict what it will do, if DiscWizard hits a red
block. Presumably the transferred file will
be corrupted as well. It all depends on
whether a red block, is in the middle of a
real file or not.

Paul

 

[Aditya Kumar]

Make sure your valuable personal data is backed up ?
Do you at least have a copy of your email database
file, and any personal data files ?

*******

The red blocks mean the scan found CRC errors. At least
one sector in the 95MB, must have been bad. If one of your
personal data files was stored there, the file would be
corrupted. Depending on the file type, the blemish might
not be too serious, or it could be catastrophic (file
becomes unusable). In the worst case, the computer
might not be able to boot from the drive any more.

The bad sectors, could also be in an area of the disk,
where no file is currently stored. If that is the case,
then no harm done (for now).

I replace hard drives at regular intervals, and usually
before they get that bad. A new hard drive, in USD,
costs from $40 to $100, and is cheaper than paying
a data recovery firm $500 to $1000, to try to get
back lost data. On average, I buy two new hard
drives per year, and my storage requirements are
pretty modest (no video or music collection).

To move data from the old drive to the new, Seagate
offers DiscWizard if you buy one of their drives.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=DiscWizard&vg....

I move data using Linux "dd". If there are red blocks
showing, then I'd have to use something like
"dd_rescue", to skip over the bad blocks.

The overall transfer, using that "dd" method, could be
quite slow. The DiscWizard is a file by file
transfer, and should go faster. I cannot
predict what it will do, if DiscWizard hits a red
block. Presumably the transferred file will
be corrupted as well. It all depends on
whether a red block, is in the middle of a
real file or not.

    Paul

Paul, all:

Thanks for your response.

The red blocks (all of them) were scattered (two of them together) and
they were in the first half of the whole diagram -- what I think it
means is that the problem would be in C drive. Most of my data is on
the D Drive (which is the half of the drive and I reckon physically it
should be the latter half of it). The C drive has recently got a new
OS installed on it so there is nothing critical.

What do you think I could do now? Is there a way these sectors can be
"locked" so that nothing can be written on them? In good old days I
think chkdsk could do that, no? I am using Vista on this. Would it be
a good idea to do the "blocking" of these sectors so that nothing can
be written on it, take the drive out and put it in a USB-SATA box and
use it as a external drive? I could get a new Hard drive for the PC. I
have another HDD on this PC which is Linux formatted and I use Ubuntu
on that. I usually use Ubuntu and mount this Windows Hard drive to get
the data whenever I need.

Thanks again,
Aditya

 

[Paul]

Paul, all:

Thanks for your response.

The red blocks (all of them) were scattered (two of them together) and
they were in the first half of the whole diagram -- what I think it
means is that the problem would be in C drive. Most of my data is on
the D Drive (which is the half of the drive and I reckon physically it
should be the latter half of it). The C drive has recently got a new
OS installed on it so there is nothing critical.

What do you think I could do now? Is there a way these sectors can be
"locked" so that nothing can be written on them? In good old days I
think chkdsk could do that, no? I am using Vista on this. Would it be
a good idea to do the "blocking" of these sectors so that nothing can
be written on it, take the drive out and put it in a USB-SATA box and
use it as a external drive? I could get a new Hard drive for the PC. I
have another HDD on this PC which is Linux formatted and I use Ubuntu
on that. I usually use Ubuntu and mount this Windows Hard drive to get
the data whenever I need.

Thanks again,
Aditya

I don't see anything to suggest the old "file marking" scheme. I did
work with an OS years ago, that would change the file name of a file
to "file.name.bad", so that an errored sector would be locked away
in the file and not used again. But on modern disks, there are sparing
schemes, and a bad sector can be substituted by a good one. The disk
keeps a table of bad sectors, and their spares, so that more good
sectors are the result. If the sparing scheme runs out of spare sectors, then
the sector would stay bad. And in that case, I don't know if there is
a way to mark the permanently bad sector or not.

chkdsk /r would appear to be the command that scans the surface. I've
never used it. And the program "Spinrite", attempts to read the sector
many times, on the chance that the sector will read correctly at
some point. I'd rather spend my money on a new drive, then buy a
copy of Spinrite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chkdsk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinrite

I would make sure my data was safe first, before doing any further
experiments with a drive like that. In other words, buy a new drive,
and copy the data over. *Then*, you can run chkdsk on the old drive.
There is a danger, that when chkdsk runs, it could actually do damage
to the file system, during its attempts to correct things. You
want your data to be *safe*, before attempting repairs.

According to this, chkdsk can mark "bad" sectors, so maybe there is a
facility in the file system, to avoid the sectors in question.

http://www.vfrazee.com/ms-dos/6.22/help/chkdsk.htm

Paul