Computer has suddenly slowed down drastically.

grady

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Apr 1, 2013
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So - As the title says, after no memorable event my computer seems to have slowed horribly. To start with, here is dertails on the hardware:

ASRock Z77 Motherboard
Geforce GTX670
Intel I5 3470
Western Digital WD Black 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"
Corsair Vengeance 8GB RAM

This concerns all tasks, web browsing, game playing etc. Where I used to have 50 ish FPS in my heavily modded skyrim, It's now dropped to around 20. And that's when I'm running a lower performance ENB. I have checked the temperatues of both my GPU and CPU, and they both come out at around 35.
Personally, I suspsect it is the Hard Drive. I have ran defrags, malware programs, and CCleaner also - To no avail.
What I have noticed however is an increased whirring from the drive, more like vibrations however- Could this somehow be physical damage? Even if my computer doesn't exactly move all day.
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
 
Solution
If you've tried the test in windows and your getting that error, providing it sees the drive in the first place then it's highly probable your drive is failing either way I would ship it off to wd and just explain it's failing there own diagnostics. I know the black is a minimum of 3 years I think it may even be 5 years.

grady

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The fan on my GPU? No, I can see it moving still - And besides, I doubt that the temperature would remain that low if that was the case. As for the other fans around the case, they are all operational.
 

cje1986

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Feb 15, 2014
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Bad hard drive is most likely. Increased seek times caused by wear can cause the symptoms your describing. Maybe time to replace if you can afford to go solid state otherwise at least something like a caviar black. Also if you were to go down this root. Installing Windows 8 can improve frame rates as it is more efficient than 7.
 

grady

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Thanks, I think buying windows 8 is a tad too pricey. But could you provide a link to said hard-drive? Another question I'd like to ask, is I heard something along the lines of a HDD being converted to POI? Now I have no idea what this means, but I hear reversing the process can help. So any information on that is appreciated.
On another note, I have not even had this computer for a year yet. Is it normal for the hard drive to crumble so quickly?
Oh, and I'm fairly certain an SSD is out of my reach. I've already used around 650GB as it is, and getting an SSD of size would be heftily costy.
 

cje1986

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Some drives are of particularly poor quality. In my experience samsung drives are particularly bad. Download something like UBCD and use seatools to look for bad sectors on the drive, also just to be sure use real temp and prime 95 to verify running temps of your cpu. For solid state something like corsair force gs is excellent. Just Google western digital caviar black for a mechanical drive. Personally I use a combo of both ssd for os and we'll used apps. Mechanical for data
 

grady

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Using Seagate, the test fails every time - Doesn't start. Any ideas?
Trying WD's own tools now, I have to go out to eat so I will be away whilst it runs the tests. Thanks you for your help thus far.
 

cje1986

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In the bios you will need to change your drives from ahci to ide in order to perform the test as seatools won't check ahci drives. Just remember to change it back in order to run Windows again.
 

cje1986

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Another thing to note is you may also have problems running certain diagnostic tools that aren't compatible with a uefi bios so look for versions that are uefi compatible
 

grady

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Apr 1, 2013
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Okay, so I tried with the tool suggested by Western Digital. (Chose my product and they provided a download)
And still the diagnosis won't start - I get an error reading "Extended Test:Read Verify Sector Ext error!"
Also tried a quick test and got:

"Quicktest on Drive 1 did not complete!
Status code = 07 (Failed test element), failure checkpoint = 97 (Unkown test)
SMART self-test did not complete on drive 1"
 

cje1986

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Feb 15, 2014
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If you've tried the test in windows and your getting that error, providing it sees the drive in the first place then it's highly probable your drive is failing either way I would ship it off to wd and just explain it's failing there own diagnostics. I know the black is a minimum of 3 years I think it may even be 5 years.
 
Solution