Sluggish SSD

[Plum_TreeS]

Yo LTT Forumners,

 

I built a computer for a co-worker. It had been running assumingely good for a good few months. Last week the boot drive went kaput. Indication of this were windows functions being slow to work in the desktop, so I’m assuming a big part of the problem is the SSD. Furthermore, I reinstalled windows with a USB 3.0 drive in SS USB port and the whole installation just crawled through. I finally got Win 10 Pro. Installed but now it gets hung on MSI’s “Conquer The Battlefield” screen after attempting to boot into windows. 
 

HELP pls :)

[mr fobs]

If you have tried different SATA ports/M.2 Slot, or, if SATA, a different SATA power plug and it is still not booting, it Sounds like a bad drive.

 

I can't tell from the picture, but is the drive recognized in the BIOS?

[StDragon]

The SSD drive is probably failing. If possible, try and run vendor drive diagnostics. If it's a Samsung, get the Magician utility. If it's a Seagate, get the SeaTools SSD GUI. etc.

[Plum_TreeS]

8 hours ago, mr fobs said:

If you have tried different SATA ports/M.2 Slot, or, if SATA, a different SATA power plug and it is still not booting, it Sounds like a bad drive.

 

I can't tell from the picture, but is the drive recognized in the BIOS?

Hey so it is recognized by the system and I used Crystal Disk Info and got back an 89% Good rating so I thought that was okay for what it was. However my system was far more responsive when I installed it in there for re-install as opposed to the system in question. Could mobo/bios be an issue? I’ll try a new SATA cable/port when I get home!

[Plum_TreeS]

7 hours ago, StDragon said:

The SSD drive is probably failing. If possible, try and run vendor drive diagnostics. If it's a Samsung, get the Magician utility. If it's a Seagate, get the SeaTools SSD GUI. etc.

Hey, sorry for late reply but CrystalDisk info application gave me a 89% Good reading back on the drive and when in my system would install and boot fast. In system in question it does not move fast at all. Any idears on that?

[Plum_TreeS]

New findings. When i unplugged HDD (Not the boot drive) the speed demon was back! Plugged the HDD in along side SSD and the issue was back. I did a bad but oh well… and plugged HDD in after the system booted and saw that its format SOMEHOW got changed to RAW. I think the system definitely doesn’t like that so I’m going to try to format. However, it won’t let me within windows so I’m going to try inside of WindowsRE or DBAN if all else fails. 

[Kilrah]

Screams like dead HDD.

You never mentioned there was one until now...

[StDragon]

26 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Screams like dead HDD.

You never mentioned there was one until now...

I agree.

 

One symptom of a failing drive is that it issues a flurry of IRQ requests (AKA, an "interrupt storm") which in turn slogs down the CPU in the attention getting. So basically everything else grinds to a halt until you disconnect that failing piece of hardware that's issuing the interrupts. It's quite common to see with failing drives and network adapters.

[Plum_TreeS]

On 9/16/2021 at 8:49 AM, Kilrah said:

Screams like dead HDD.

You never mentioned there was one until now...

Thank you and sorry. That is the problem! Im gonna check its health now. 

[Plum_TreeS]

On 9/16/2021 at 9:19 AM, StDragon said:

I agree.

 

One symptom of a failing drive is that it issues a flurry of IRQ requests (AKA, an "interrupt storm") which in turn slogs down the CPU in the attention getting. So basically everything else grinds to a halt until you disconnect that failing piece of hardware that's issuing the interrupts. It's quite common to see with failing drives and network adapters.

Oh okay cool! It is RAW formatted now? Is this indicative of HDD failure? If not how can I reformat? Because nothing is working… native windows, aomei disk part tool, etc. 

[StDragon]

14 minutes ago, Plum_TreeS said:

Oh okay cool! It is RAW formatted now? Is this indicative of HDD failure? If not how can I reformat? Because nothing is working… native windows, aomei disk part tool, etc. 

I would use DISKPART from the command line (ran as Administrator)

1. Type LIST DISK (note which disk is the one you want to clear)
2. Type SELECT DISK X (where X is the drive you want to clear)
3. Type LIST DISK to verify the disk is selected with an * by it 
4. Type CLEAN to clear all partitions from the drive. or CLEAN ALL to have it zero out all sectors on the drive (takes many hours to complete).
    

Once done, then you can initialize and format the drive as NTFS.

 

 

[aramini]

11 hours ago, Plum_TreeS said:

Oh okay cool! It is RAW formatted now? Is this indicative of HDD failure? If not how can I reformat? Because nothing is working… native windows, aomei disk part tool, etc. 

It could be indicative of HDD failure. If there is some bad sectors that happened to contain the drive partition info, NTFS info, or other metadata. A drive shouldn't just automagically get formatted to RAW or some other format on it's own. Unless you inadvertently formatted it or some other utility did it, there might be data corruption or bad sectors/blocks.

 

11 hours ago, StDragon said:

I would use DISKPART from the command line (ran as Administrator)

1. Type LIST DISK (note which disk is the one you want to clear)
2. Type SELECT DISK X (where X is the drive you want to clear)
3. Type LIST DISK to verify the disk is selected with an * by it 
4. Type CLEAN to clear all partitions from the drive. or CLEAN ALL to have it zero out all sectors on the drive (takes many hours to complete).
    

Once done, then you can initialize and format the drive as NTFS.

That doesn't get to the root cause however. If the HDD is failing, I don't know why you'd be wasting time with all of that before backing it up/performing data recovery (if possible) and then running diagnostics to make sure the drive is sound. If it's failing, it's just a matter of time before it gives up the ghost.

 

Also, the reason for it running slow can be due to Windows waiting for the drive controller to report back. If there are bad sectors/bad blocks, it will try to read the data several times before timing out, notifying Windows, and marking the sectors/blocks as bad.

 

Modern drives have spare hidden sectors/blocks in the case that some go bad. The drive transparently marks them bad and tries to move data to spare sectors/blocks. By the time you have bad sectors/blocks detectable by showing up in the OS, it's only a matter of time before the drive gets worse and worse. Especially with traditional mechanical, magnetic spinning disks. I wouldn't trust it with my data, at least not without any diagnostics or S.M.A.R.T info showing me it is OK.

 

If you care about the data on it, the best practice order of operations would be:

 

1. Backup data/perform data recovery.
   
   Just because the partition table is hosed or changed doesn't necessarily mean the data isn't there, although it's a crap shoot. Running diagnostics puts stress on a drive. You don't want to stress an already/potentially failing drive more than necessary before backing up/recovering the data (if possible) and risk losing data. Unless you already have a recent backup, backup/data recovery should always be priority #1 if you care about the data.
    
2. Run diagnostics
   
   Now that data is safe or recovered if it was possible, proceed with the diagnostics
   
   (a) If all is well, reformat the drive, restore the data
   (b) If it has physical errors or other issues, replace the drive, it's a ticking time bomb.

[StDragon]

13 hours ago, aramini said:

That doesn't get to the root cause however. <snip>

I 100% agree with you. But it's been stated already that the drive is suspect and to run diags. But now the OP is wanting to reuse the drive now that is online with a RAW disk status.

IMHO, I would be running a full diag and zero out the entire drive to be sure. Then follow up by checking the SMART stats.

But yes, re-using a suspect drive without validating the integrity of it is only a setup for failure of data loss. . If that's how the OP wants to roll, oh well.

[aramini]

3 hours ago, StDragon said:

But yes, re-using a suspect drive without validating the integrity of it is only a setup for failure of data loss. . If that's how the OP wants to roll, oh well.

Yeah, I wasn't saying all that so as to challenge your reply, I was saying that for benefit of the OP. But, sure, it's their hardware/data, so ultimately their choice. 

[Plum_TreeS]

On 9/18/2021 at 1:37 PM, aramini said:

Yeah, I wasn't saying all that so as to challenge your reply, I was saying that for benefit of the OP. But, sure, it's their hardware/data, so ultimately their choice. 

Thank you both! I’ll see what she wants to do with the drive and may toy with it on my own using the Zeroize. Nothing but game downloads and such so no backup is really needed! Thank all of you though, you’ve taught me more than what I can here knowing so thank.