How to be sure if the hard drive is dead

nick_hags · Dec 24, 2017

Hello everyone, I built a custom PC about 3 months ago, intended as a very small budget build workstation. The hard drive of choice, a WD Caviar 1TB 7500RPM drive from www.starmicroinc.net.
Link for the product: https://starmicroinc.net/wd-caviar-blue-1tb-sata-3-5-oem-hdd-wd10ezex/
Of course, I have found excuses to upgrade components on the computer. I've upgraded the ram and gpu in the past 2 weeks. The computer has been freezing more and more frequently, I thought it was because I recently upgraded to a GTX 1050 gpu. I recently have started playing a few different games on Steam.

The rest of my specs are:
Mobo: ASUS M5A78L-USB3, 760G chipset
cpu: AMD FX 4300 quad core
ram: Adata xpg v2 ddr3 2x8GB 1866 MHz
psu: Antec 650W
gpu: Geforce GTX 1050

Today, I finally got the task manager to open today, and saw that the hard drive was listed as 99% in use. I can do nothing else on the computer, such as run a conclusive hard drive test. I have a linux plug-in on a usb stick, but haven't used it yet. Is it reasonable to say the hard drive is done and move on and buy a more reliable hard drive?

Thanks!

USAFRet · Dec 24, 2017

Could be a lot of things.
I'd suspect some software is running, rather than a dead drive.

Look to see what processes are running
Boot up in safe mode and see if this still happens
Done a deep virus and malware scan lately?

nick_hags · Dec 24, 2017

USAFRet :

There aren't a bunch of processes running at startup, and what is running, I cancel. I am scanning for malware now. I have a dual monitor setup, and have task manager open on one screen and the windows defender scan open on the other. The hard drive is sitting at a constant 100% usage. Going down the list, the only thing using the disk is the antimalware scan, using 0.1 MB/s. I will post when the results come. It freezes periodically for about 5-10 minutes but is slowly making progress. When it's running well, it's about 50 MB/s, using 70% of the disk and 50% of the cpu.

Update: Windows Defender full scan has finished, no threats. I'm running a few different scans to see if something fell through the cracks at all. I came home after the computer sat idle for about 3 hours, and the disk was still at 100% in use, all processes showed using 0 MB/s. Thanks for your help!

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