olivierhacking

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Hi everyone,

Recently, and suddenly (happenned a few days ago when I switched on my PC) my two hard drives have becmoe excruciatingly slow :(. Winows takes ages to start up, and when I coopy files to a usb drive, the speed ranges between 1 and 3 MB/s. It used to be much faster, it just suddenly started to become very slow, both my C drive and my L drive. When I record with fraps for example, the frame rate goes from >50 to <20 !! This was defninitely not the case before. Are my hard drives failing? I have defragmented both, each are 1TB in size and not running in raid 0 or raid 1. Both of them are 5400rpm as well. Is there anything I can do to fix this?
Thank you for your help! Really need it :)

 
Run a disk diagnostic, through the BIOS, software from the drive vendor or off a CD like Ultimate Boot CD.

Don't use 5400 rpm drives in desktops, bit slow. If you need to get a new drive, get a 7200 rpm model.
 

olivierhacking

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So any disk diagnostic tool will do the trick?
 


Not always. HD Tune has a utility that I think runs well on all or most drive models. You probably want to check the drive vendor first, then the generic stuff.
 

olivierhacking

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WIth the drive cables do you mean the SATA cables? I switched them and plugged them in different ports on my mobo.. still no difference :(
Could this problem be due to something I installed?
 

Device Unknown

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I somehow don't think you have *** Hard Drive problem. Sounds more like you have *** virus or rogue application taking up resources. Go into task manager and turn off as many services you can then test again. Also, obviously do *** through virus/malware scan. That would be my bet.
 


Could easily be from software, if you installed something right before this happened would be a good idea to uninstall it.

Didyou run a drive test? Sudden slowdowns can come from the drive seeking excessively when going around bad sectors.
 


Posted that already, HD Tune, drive vendor or Ultimate Boot Cd. There are others but one of those 3 should get you what you need.
 

olivierhacking

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So, I tried HD Tune. Firstly, I did the read test and it went well- a bit before halfway it became MUCH slower though, minimum = 6.0 mb/s and maximum is 112.5 mb/s. I then clicked on the 'health' tab in the program, and one 'section' was yellow- it is called: "(C7) Ultra DMA CRC Error Count". I clicked on it, and it said that there was a communication error which may be caused by a damaged cable. The health status was thus on 'warning'. Anyway, I then ran the error scan and there was not a single problem.. Could my problem be software related? o_O
 
Could be an issue with Windows. Maybe worth spending $50 on a new 7200 rpm drive to find out? Install Windows fresh on a new drive, that way your settings and files are all safe while you do the test. If it runs better, you can start moving your files over. I don't recomment moving all of the profile over, because if you have corrupt files, registry, whatever, if you copy the whole user pofile, you will just move the problem over as well.
 

olivierhacking

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OK, I might give that a try. Don't know when I will be able to buy one though :p
But I will post here when/ if I do! Would you consider an SSD worth the money, by the way? I was thinking of getting one of those- pity it costs so absurdly much :/
 
If you have the extra budget, an SSD is a noticable improvement in speed. I would rank it in the class of a high-end video card though, pretty to look at and for pure numbers, but not "needed". A good regular disk drive would provide a good chunck of performance of an SSD for a much lower price. Just like a tier or 2 bellow the "fastest" card would run any game well enough to play on.
 

olivierhacking

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So something like this? http://www.alternate.be/html/product/Harddisks_3,5_inch_SATA/Samsung/HD204UI/471783/?
But it has 2x less cache.. does that change anything?
 


This should be the one.