Another Hard Drive acting slow

[barnaclesgarona]

Hi there. I had issues with a Hard Disk failing and having a large amount of errors causing my games to stutter and causing insanely slow load times. I since replaced that hard disk with a 2.5" from my laptop which has been working much faster than the old hard drive (for obvious reasons), but I've noticed my games are now "pausing" when they are loading. I'm not experiencing stuttering like I was before, but it seems my games are now loading very slowly.

As well, I've also noticed a slight decline in performance in general, although it's very negligible.

I'm just wondering if my computer is somehow causing my hard disk to fail or is causing it to malfunction in some way. This was a 1 year old hard disk, and it shouldn't be dying. I also used Disk Checkup, and here's the results.

Spoiler

[cpp]*** DiskCheckup V3.1 Build: 1001 Report ***

SysInfo DLL Version: SysInfo v1.0 Build: 1014
Time of export: 09:11:39 19-Dec-2011

Device information:
Device ID: 0
Interface: ATA
Device Capacity: 305242 MB
Serial Number: 50D3C6U4T
Model Number: TOSHIBA MK3265GSX
Firmware Revision: GJ003M
Partitions:
C: 293180 MB
D: 10561 MB

ATA information:

Disk geometry:
Cylinders: 38913
Tracks/Cylinder: 255
Sectors/Track: 63
Bytes/Sector: 512
Total disk sectors: 625142448
Logical sector size: 512
Physical sector size: 512
Media rotation rate: 5400 RPM
Buffer size: 8192 KB
ECC size: 0 Bytes

Standards compliance:
ATA8-ACS Supported: Yes
ATA/ATAPI-7 Supported: Yes
ATA/ATAPI-6 Supported: Yes
ATA/ATAPI-5 Supported: Yes
ATA/ATAPI-4 Supported: Yes
Serial/Parallel: Serial
SATA 3.0 Compilance: No
SATA 2.6 Compilance: Yes
SATA 2.5 Compilance: Yes
SATA II: Ext Compilance: Yes
SATA 1.0a Compilance: Yes
ATA8-AST Compilance: Yes
World Wide ID: 5000039283403C26

Feature support:
SMART supported: Yes
SMART enabled: Yes
SMART self-test supported: Yes
SMART error log supported: Yes
LBA supported: Yes
IORDY supported: Yes
CFast supported: No
DMA supported: Yes
Maximum Multiword DMA mode supported: 2
Multiword DMA selected: None
Maximum UltraDMA mode supported: 5
UltraDMA selected: 5
Maximum PIO mode supported: 4
SATA Compliance: Yes
NCQ priority information supported: No
Unload while NCQ commands are outstanding supported: Yes
Phy Event Counters supported: Yes
Receipt of power management requests supported: Yes
NCQ feature set supported: Yes
SATA Gen2 Signaling Speed (3.0Gb/s) supported: Yes
SATA Gen1 Signaling Speed (1.5Gb/s) supported: Yes
Software Settings Preservation: Supported, Enabled
In-order data delivery: Not supported
Initiating power management: Supported, Disabled
DMA Setup auto-activation: Supported, Enabled
Non-zero buffer offsets: Not supported
Trusted Computing supported: No
Host Protected Area (HPA) supported: Yes
Read look-ahead supported: Yes
Read look-ahead enabled: Yes
Write cache supported: Yes
Write cache enabled: Yes
Power management supported: Yes
Security mode supported: Yes
Security mode enabled: No
Device Configuration Overlay (DCO) supported: Yes
48bit Addressing supported: Yes
Auto Acoustic Managment (AAM) supported: No
Power-up in Standby (PUIS) supported: No
Advanced Power Management (APM) supported: Yes
Advanced Power Management (APM) enabled: Yes
Current APM level: Minimum power consumption without Standby
CompactFlash Association (CFA) supported: No
General Purpose Logging (GPL) supported: Yes
Streaming supported: No
Media card pass through supported: No
Extended power conditions supported: No
Extended status reporting supported: No
Write-read-verify supported: No
Free-fall control supported: No
TRIM command supported: No
SCT command transport supported: Yes
NV Cache enabled: No
NV Cache Power Management supported: No

SMART ATTRIBUTES:
ID Description Status Value Worst Threshold Raw Value TEC
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Raw Read Error Rate OK 100 100 50 0 N.A.
2 Throughput Performance OK 100 100 50 0 N.A.
3 Spin Up Time OK 100 100 1 1164 N.A.
4 Start/Stop Count OK 100 100 0 1705 N.A.
5 Reallocated Sector Count OK 100 100 50 0 N.A.
7 Seek Error Rate OK 100 100 50 0 N.A.
8 Seek Time Performance OK 100 100 50 0 N.A.
9 Power On Time OK 88 88 0 5054 N.A.
10 Spin Retry Count OK 134 100 30 0 N.A.
12 Power Cycle Count OK 100 100 0 1698 N.A.
191 G-sense Error Rate OK 100 100 0 159 N.A.
192 Power off Retract Count OK 100 100 0 36 N.A.
193 Load Cycle Count OK 94 94 0 62447 N.A.
194 Temperature OK 100 100 0 32 C N.A.
196 Reallocation Event Count OK 100 100 0 0 N.A.
197 Current Pending Sector Count OK 100 100 0 0 N.A.
198 Uncorrectable Sector Count OK 100 100 0 0 N.A.
199 UltraDMA CRC Error Count OK 200 200 0 0 N.A.
220 Disk shift OK 100 100 0 71 N.A.
222 Loaded hours OK 91 91 0 3656 N.A.
223 Load/Unload retry count OK 100 100 0 0 N.A.
224 Load friction OK 100 100 0 0 N.A.
226 Load-in Time OK 100 100 0 254 N.A.
240 Head flying hours OK 100 100 1 0 N.A.

[/cpp]

 

[sminlal]

Was your old drive a 3.5" drive? Laptop drives are generally slower than desktop drives because they typically spin at a lower RPM (to conserve power) and they don't store as much data per track, meaning they require more revolutions to read the same amount of data.

 

[barnaclesgarona]

Yes, it's a laptop drive, but this drive was working much faster than it is now, which was the same problem with my last drive. I know 2.5" are much slower, but it's pausing as if it can't read some sectors.

 

[sminlal]

If the same drive is working slower than before, then it's either a fragmentation issue or potentially a problem with the drive itself. You can try using a utility such as DiskCheckup which can report the SMART error statistics for the drive - if it's having problems reading data from the platters it should show up in the error counters.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_drive#ATA_S.M.A.R.T._attributes