Is this a dying drive ?

kingdom9214

kingdom9214

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 3, 2011
Messages
270
I finally got my wife's PC done last night, so I install windows and start playing around on WoW and Diablo 3. I started to notice long load times and the OS hanging when it starts. So after a few times of restarting I'm pretty sure the drive is acting up. So I install HD Tune and run some benchmarks and this HDD score is all over the place. She has a Seagate ST3750640AS

I'm not really sure what this means. From what I've google most people experience between 65-75mb/s with this drive. I'm only getting 40-50mb/s with some serious drops. I ran a error scan and it didn't find any bad sectors. Also I'm not sure about this but it say my Access time is 26 ms ! Newegg says my drives Average Seek Time should be 8.5ms, not sure if that's the same thing but if it is that's almost 3 times the normal time !

Note I ran this benchmark 3 times, the last 2 I changed the Sata cables and ports. Still the same thing. Is this a dying drive or do I just need to get a new WD Green 1tb ?

HDTune.png

HDTuneErrorScan.png
 
Is this the OS drive? Does the health status report anything bad?

I'm not really sure what this means.
Click to expand...

The drive could have hard to read sectors (the SMART status should show that) or some other application (virus, antivirus, indexing service, defragger ...) could be using the drive.
 
One of the things I'd be doing if this was my drive would be checking more thorough performance using Hard Disk Sentinel - it's just what i've been doing a lot lately, but to be honest if it is under warrenty, the drive benchmark obviously is showing what it should not be doing
 
I do not know if this is a failing drive, but unless you have important files already backed up - which you most likely do - you could consider this idea.

Try the product called SpinRite at http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm and see if it can help you keep your drive useful or at least able to function enough to extract the things you need from it.

Granted you may already have such software, etc, but this is my two cents worth.

Best Wishes for your resolution.

RudeRedDog
 
Before trying SpinRite or Hard Disk Sentinel I would see if the drive is actually bad using the SMART. The graph is does not prove that there is anything at all wrong with the drive especially since the surface scan passed without a single bad block.
 
That benchmark is meaningless if its also your system drive, since it doesn't tell us what other processes may be accessing the drive and interfering with the benchmark. A more accurate benchmark would be connecting it to another PC as a secondary drive so its not being interrupted by the O/S. You can also get a copy of Hard Disk Sentinel as suggested and see what it says.

But the first order of business whenever you suspect trouble is making sure your backup is up to date, since if a drive is in fact failing physically then they can often go off the cliff very quickly and you only have minutes to get your data off before it becomes inaccessible.

Personally, I wouldn't bother with this drive as an O/S drive even if it was healthy, let alone for running Diablo3, not at those speeds. If you've built or rebuilt a PC then with SSD prices fallen as low as they have you really owe it to yourself to get an inexpensive SSD (hell you can get 120GB for as low as $80 if you catch a sale), make the SSD your C-Drive and make the 750GB your D-DRive and contains stuff like media, videos, pictures, etc
 
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I'd download the self-booting program MHDD (HDDguru.com has it) and run its surface scan, which will report the LBAs of any sectors that need more than about a dozen tries (150ms) to read.
 
Well after taking out the HDD and formatting it I plugged it into my PC and ran the benchmark again. It still only got about 65mb/s but without any drops. So i guess the drive is fine its just an older slow HDD. So I'll going to be getting a 2tb WD green =P

Thanks for the help guys !
 
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