Faulty hard drive slows down computer the second you plug it in

[zelE]

Every time i plug in this hard drive, to my main machine, to my dads machine, and my laptop it lags the hell out of it. When it gets unplugged its fine though, whats goin’ on?

[Kilrah]

It's dead/dying.

[alexitx]

The drive may very well be faulty, but that's primarily Windows being Windows. When you open file explorer it tries to refresh the drives and when a faulty drive doesn't respond it just craps itself and hangs. Windows Defender and other AVs also attempt to scan external drives when plugged in. It even happens if a mapped network drive or network share goes down.

[Kilrah]

It's not just Windows. Had someone's failing drive that had a bunch of pending sectors to try to recover, windows would hang, connected it to linux, trying to mount it on Linux would do just the same and hang completely, wasn't even able to reboot, even after force disconnecting it. At least that had worked on Win.

 

Trying to mount bad drives just doesn't have meaningful timeouts...

 

Not mounting it and imaging it with ddrescue worked for recovery since it's specifically setting sector read timeouts and max retries. Interestingly the drive cleared the pending sectors and works fine again after full writes and rereads so it wasn't actually faulty sectors, just bit rot.

[zelE]

3 hours ago, Kilrah said:

It's not just Windows. Had someone's failing drive that had a bunch of pending sectors to try to recover, windows would hang, connected it to linux, trying to mount it on Linux would do just the same and hang completely, wasn't even able to reboot, even after force disconnecting it. At least that had worked on Win.

 

Trying to mount bad drives just doesn't have meaningful timeouts...

 

Not mounting it and imaging it with ddrescue worked for recovery since it's specifically setting sector read timeouts and max retries. Interestingly the drive cleared the pending sectors and works fine again after full writes and rereads so it wasn't actually faulty sectors, just bit rot.

how would i reset the drive without making the computer unusable? it's like the SECOND anything freezes i can't open any apps at all.

[Kilrah]

Try a live linux usb, with automount disabled. If even that doesn't work then it's dead and only good for the trash.