Hard drive failing?...

jabaroon

HI All,

I have a SATA drive (not primary) in my PC. Recently it has started taking AGES to copy anything onto the drive (single partition ). For exaple, it took about 15 minutes to copy a 400mb file from c: to d:

However, once the file had copied to d:, it only took about 5 seconds to copy it back to c:!!

I downloaded tha manafacturers diagnostic tools and performed a full test (including a surface test) and it passed with flying colours. I was actually hoping it would fail as it would then be a simple RMA...but given that it has passed, I am now confused!?!....

Any ideas?
Thanks,
Jab

zuma

More details on the drive please....manufacturer/model...etc.

There are many SMART test programs out there so try a few....not made by the manufacturer and tell us what happens.

leeroybrown

I wouldn't say that there is any major need to try another test tool. I have tested many drives from most manufacturers and have never seen a test tool pass a drive that has failed in any way.

I would suggest that the filesystem is close to full and very heavily fragmented.

Capt'n Midnight

Smart only picks up about half of drive failures. Sometimes drives fail without warning. Viruses or background process or Antivirus could slow down stuff.

Is the drive making soft noises are harsh noises.

Do you have anyother device on the SATA controller ?

jabaroon

leeroybrown wrote:

I wouldn't say that there is any major need to try another test tool. I have tested many drives from most manufacturers and have never seen a test tool pass a drive that has failed in any way.

I would suggest that the filesystem is close to full and very heavily fragmented.

Tried another disk test tool (including the windows one!). Both have said everything is fine.

As regards fragmentation, its a fresh install that was formated a few days ago. The drive is 250gb with 150gb free. Ran disk keeper to ensure that fragmentation wasn't an issue. After disk keeper, same results on performance when copying a large file.

Drive is a Hitachi Deskstar 250gb SATA.

Cheers for the ideas and help,
Jab

jabaroon

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

Smart only picks up about half of drive failures. Sometimes drives fail without warning. Viruses or background process or Antivirus could slow down stuff.

Is the drive making soft noises are harsh noises.

Do you have anyother device on the SATA controller ?

Its making soft noises as it trys to write the files. It sounds (somethimes) a little like its searching for something and then resets and then starts the search again (if that makes any sense!).

I have previously tried switching off my anti-virus realtime protection, but it had no noticable difference.

Not sure about the SATA controller question. Its a dell XPS that came with a single drive. The drive I am referring to is a new one I have added. I simply plugged in the SATA connector to the connection beside the existing one on the mobo

Jab

leeroybrown

Hmmm.

As I suggested in another thread a few minutes ago, have a look in the windoes event logs and see if there are any red 'x' messages corresponding to the time window that you are having the problem copying.

Do internal file copies on the D drive (not moves) take a long time as well as C to D copies?

jabaroon

leeroybrown wrote:

Hmmm.

As I suggested in another thread a few minutes ago, have a look in the windoes event logs and see if there are any red 'x' messages corresponding to the time window that you are having the problem copying.

Do internal file copies on the D drive (not moves) take a long time as well as C to D copies?

Just checked, not errors in any of the system logs. It seems to take as long to copy from another drive onto the drive as it does to copy from on the drive to another location on the drive.

frustrating!

fenris

two things to try on the software side
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244617/EN-US/
Microsoft Driver verifier - this will let you know if you have a corrupt driver, I had a dodgy USB driver that was causing one of my IDE drives to dissapear.

Also

http://www.glop.org/starforce/

Starforce is a russian copyprotection system that is installed with many demo's and games but does not deinstall when the game is removed. It inserts its own drivers at ring 0 between the real drivers and the hardware, its maiin effect is giving the appearance of read errors to the drive and OS causing to OS to attempt to use old 16 bit compatibility modes, at best it slows things down and causes problems, at worst there are reports of damage to newer drives that cannot suppport those older modes on a sustained basis.
The link tells you how to check for it and get rid of it.

jabaroon

fenris wrote:

two things to try on the software side
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244617/EN-US/
Microsoft Driver verifier - this will let you know if you have a corrupt driver, I had a dodgy USB driver that was causing one of my IDE drives to dissapear.

Also

http://www.glop.org/starforce/

Starforce is a russian copyprotection system that is installed with many demo's and games but does not deinstall when the game is removed. It inserts its own drivers at ring 0 between the real drivers and the hardware, its maiin effect is giving the appearance of read errors to the drive and OS causing to OS to attempt to use old 16 bit compatibility modes, at best it slows things down and causes problems, at worst there are reports of damage to newer drives that cannot suppport those older modes on a sustained basis.
The link tells you how to check for it and get rid of it.

WOW, Starforce.....I checked and I dont have it, but that crap boils my blood.....who knows what other junk is lurking on my system.

As regards the microsoft verifier.exe thing....I read the page but am nervous about running it given all the warnings! What way did you run it (eg: verifier.exe /???) what switches do you use to make sure you dont do any damage and just report!

Cheers,
Jab

SouperComputer

what about ventilation for your case? are the drive temps good?

Ideally you want to keep your HDA below 39deg C

jabaroon

SouperComputer wrote:

what about ventilation for your case? are the drive temps good?

Ideally you want to keep your HDA below 39deg C

Just did a 'touch test' (!!) and it seems fine. Where did you get the 39deg number from tho?...is that a formally recognised number?

Ta,
Jab