First part of hard drive has a really slow read speed but the rest is normal?

Miguel010

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Oct 24, 2015
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Hello!

So I was just trying to find ways to speed up my loading times while gaming and I found a software called HD Tune Pro. I tried to run it and started to have doubts 'cause I didn't see any other result similar to mine. Here's what I'm talking about: https://imgur.com/a/0SrwY

From 0 to about 150GB-ish, my read speed is extremely low reaching as low as 3.8MB/s. 150GB-500GB seems pretty normal (that's what the other results look like).

Is there something I need to do to "fix" this? Or is this normal for a 3-4 yr-old HDD?

Thanks!
 
Solution
There's not much to go off of in that pic. But judging from the 3 unusually high access times (yellow dots) being in the slow section, while the normal section only has one high yellow dot, my guess would be that the outer tracks of your drive are either damaged or have a disproportionately high share of remapped sectors.

You can try wiping the drive, doing a complete full format, then a complete surface scan. Maybe something shifted causing it to have problems reading the original formatting in that area. A new full format should be aligned with the shift.

Otherwise, if you wish to continue using the drive, you can just place the first partition in the 160-500 GB section, eliminating the 0-160 GB section from use entirely.
There's not much to go off of in that pic. But judging from the 3 unusually high access times (yellow dots) being in the slow section, while the normal section only has one high yellow dot, my guess would be that the outer tracks of your drive are either damaged or have a disproportionately high share of remapped sectors.

You can try wiping the drive, doing a complete full format, then a complete surface scan. Maybe something shifted causing it to have problems reading the original formatting in that area. A new full format should be aligned with the shift.

Otherwise, if you wish to continue using the drive, you can just place the first partition in the 160-500 GB section, eliminating the 0-160 GB section from use entirely.
 
Solution