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My HDD has become very slow?

Forum Storage : Hard Disks - My HDD has become very slow?

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I have a roughly 1 year old seagate 250 GB SATA hard drive .
Recently it is giving problems .I had posted earlier on the same forum about the problems and the solution

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] -save-data

but when i tried to store the data again on my HDD back, it is showing poor write times .So i performed some test on it following are the results
this is the Write benchmark
HD Tune Pro: ST3250310AS Benchmark

Write transfer rate
Transfer Rate Minimum : 1.5 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 1.8 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 1.8 MB/sec
Access Time : 15.6 ms
Burst Rate : 1.7 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 28.9%

This is the file write benchmark
HD Tune Pro: ST3250310AS File Benchmark

Drive K:

File Size: 64 MB

Block size Read speed
0.5 KB 1305 KB/s
1 KB 1505 KB/s
2 KB 1637 KB/s
4 KB 1530 KB/s
8 KB 1756 KB/s
16 KB 1766 KB/s
32 KB 1768 KB/s
64 KB 1774 KB/s
128 KB 1780 KB/s
256 KB 1786 KB/s
512 KB 1773 KB/s
1024 KB 1781 KB/s
2048 KB 1786 KB/s
4096 KB 1788 KB/s
8192 KB 1789 KB/s

Block size Write speed
0.5 KB 938 KB/s
1 KB 1254 KB/s
2 KB 1495 KB/s
4 KB 1628 KB/s
8 KB 1725 KB/s
16 KB 1769 KB/s
32 KB 1805 KB/s
64 KB 1816 KB/s
128 KB 1817 KB/s
256 KB 1817 KB/s
512 KB 1809 KB/s
1024 KB 1821 KB/s
2048 KB 1822 KB/s
4096 KB 1824 KB/s
8192 KB 1820 KB/s

This is my System config
AMD phenom 9550,2GB RAM and 500GB SATA HDD....

Is my hard disk dead or its some driver problem

****edit****

suddenly it has started working fine ...I dont now why !!!!!,still its working fine now , heres what i did

I unplugged my 500 GB and formatted 250 GB ,loaded fresh XP.
then keeping 250 GB as master i plugged 500 GB as slave ..and tried to copy stuff an it all went fine ...then i did the other way round also ,and that also worked .

still to be sure i'll run few tests on it for next few days and update here :bounce:

Message edited by nesta13 on 11-03-2008 at 04:04:25 PM

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have you given it a recent defrag?

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Reply to aznguy0028

You already identified in a previous thread that the disk wasn't reliable. Why would you store your data on it again? Do the diagnostics indicate that it's fine?

Reply to GhislainG

Here is one possibility for the low transfer rates. If the SATA drive is being run in IDE compatability mode on the motherboard, then there is a chance that the IDE channel is stuck on PIO mode wich goes about as fast as your transfer rates.

To check go to device manager and go to IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers then look at the properties of each IDE channel and look at the advanced setting tab. If one of the deveices is set to PIO instead of DMA change it. I think when I had this happen on my old IDE drive i actually had to update/resinstall the ide driver to get the change to take effect.

Also have you run seatools to check the drives health?

Reply to aggiebroz

Check your chipset drivers as well. When I installed one of my old Seagate SATA II drives under Vista recently and hooked it up to the ULI chipset (I have my other 2 drives which are SATA I running in RAID 0 on the SATA I Sil3114 chipset) it tested almost exactly the same after Vista did it's thing/found the drive/installed it's own drivers, until I pulled the ULI Chipset driver disk out and reinstalled the drivers. After installing the right drivers, it jumped to around 85mb/sec and the seek time dropped from 17ms to around 14ms.

Reply to jitpublisher

If it's a year old, I'd say just get another one. A slowing hdd after time is a sign of a dying one from experience. Hdd's aren't too expensive either. It happens.

Also, from experience, you probably won't find errors in this situation. It's just being worn out, plain and simple. That's my guess. Get another one before you lose your information for good. If it's important to you. It may or may not just crash all together at any time.

Edit : And when you start to hear clicking noises from it, that's the error code for "running out of time"

Message edited by habitat87 on 11-02-2008 at 04:38:48 PM

Reply to habitat87

Thanx for the replies....
but ,all these tests were carried out on freshly installed XP .I checked about the IDE thing as well ,all my IDE are running on DMA . I am doing all this because if its dying then i can get it replaced since it is under 3 yrs warrenty.hard disks are not that cheap back here in India.I have tried having 250 gig as slave and 500 gig master,but no help there also .

Reply to nesta13

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