Strange hard drive performance

[jonolo]

Hi all,

I have a Dell Inspiron 9300 with a Hitachi 7200rpm hard drive. A week ago my hard drive started to behave really strange, so I re-installed windows in case there was something with that. But after the installation the hard drive is still performing really bad.

I just installed HD Tach and ran a test, and this is the graph I got:

Any suggestions of what can be wrong, or is it just a faulty drive?

Sincerely //
Jonas Olofsson

 

[xientist]

Hmm... is the hard drive making any funny clicking sounds? What do you mean by behave really strange?

 

[jonolo]

Well, not exactly, there are no strange noise... But when trying to read from some parts of it the read speed goes down to almost 0MB/s, which can't be OK. But there are no read errors, just really slow read speeds...

Here is another graph from HD Tach:

//
Jonas

 

[mdalli]

It looks like as soon as your drive comes up to speed, the motor is cutting out.

Basic troubleshooting strategy -- you need to isolate what is causing the problem. This could very easily be a faulty power rail in your power supply, or even a loose connecter to the hard drive.

So, I recommend disconnecting the drive and plugging it into another case with another power supply and running the HD tach again.