• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

HD dying, or other issue?

W

WilsonH

n00b
Joined
Nov 26, 2007
Messages
31
Hi guys,

Starting the other week one of my backup drives is running under 3.0MB/sec. I can still seem to read everything from it, but it's just insanely slow. And when doing anything like unzipping anything from that slave drive the system almost comes to a halt. CPU upto 100%

Everything ive read points to the drive being in PIO mode. Which I think I did see once, I uninstalled drivers, rebooted and it says its in "Ultra DMA Mode 2" but still just crazy slow.

Drive in question is: ST3300831A(Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 ATA Hard Drive - 300GB - 7200rpm - Ultra ATA/100 (ATA-6) - IDE/EIDE - Internal)

System runs fine and has had the same setup for.. A couple years with no changes. Haven't seen any issues, other than when reading anything from that drive it just gets really slow. System has antivurus protection and really is never used for anything other than storage.

Any ideas on what could be going on?

Thanks
 
It's a backup drive :) unplug it, and go about your everyday.. if nothing out of the ordinary happens.. the drive is dying..

Either way, i'd backup now while it's possible
 
Well, its a backup/slave that i do often use. And there are some things i need to get off which im going to start to do. at 3.0 it's going to take a rather long time though :/

Was hoping there was something else going on other than simply dying. never had a drive fail this way by just getting really really slow.
 
WilsonH said:
Well, its a backup/slave that i do often use. And there are some things i need to get off which im going to start to do. at 3.0 it's going to take a rather long time though :/

Was hoping there was something else going on other than simply dying. never had a drive fail this way by just getting really really slow.
Click to expand...

Well, count your blessings. They usually go like a light bulb. It is probably slow because it is getting a lot of errors that it is trying to work around. Chances are some of the data on the drive might already be suspect.

GO HERE! Download the ISO for the DOS version, burn a CD, and boot up with that disk with the drive you want to test as the only drive connected. Run the long or complete test. That will give you and idea of the drives health.

Don
 
Thanks for the link. I got that and ran it with only that drive in..

Ran the long test, took a while and it said it passed. Has passed any test ive run. I was able to copy off all data from the drive and havent seen one error to date.

Any idea what could be causing this issue with speed other than the drive just failing? I dont really have another system I can put it in easily to see if the same things happens..

Thanks again
 
My WD 640GB drive ran <5MBps three times (corrected, then a week or month later it does it again). To fix this, I switched the SATA cables (both the large and small ones) and this would solve the issue for some time. It actually got several bad sectors a week ago and I was lucky enough to get my data copied off of it.
 
Well I popped the drive in another comp, and was getting normal speeds. So without ever getting any errors/no errors on every scan ive done and it seems fine in another computer.. Im assuming the drive isnt the problem?

Any other ideas what I can do to fix this in the original computer that is giving me the speed issues? I don't know if it something with windows/software or a problem with the IDE cable maybe? There are 2 drives on the cable, one which has remained fine.

Thanks
 
Have you tried replacing the cable to the drive? Maybe its got a broken wire or something ?
 
just replaced the cable today, with the one from the computer which was getting normals speeds. same result. main drive is fine, this drive is stuck at 2.8mb/sec and kills the system when i try to do anything with it..

really confused on what to try now.. :/
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top