HDD dying? (VERY SLOW)

[Arcanekitten]

Hi

last night I wanted to shuw down my pc but i heared a loud grinding sound coming from my pc, it came from one of my hard drives.

I use a SSD as OS boot and two HDD (one 500GB used sinces 2013~ and the second a 3TB one which I got in late 2014 early 2015ish both internal btw)

The next day I was downloading some games from my browser and wanted to install them but its taking really long so i looked at taskmanager and saw that my hdd is about the 0 - 7 MB a sec mark with a 100% activity rate (see screen sorry its in dutch but you can hopefully figure it out! EDIT Added some labels to the screen)

I am currently still extracting a game and I don't hear any noises from inside my pc.

What should i do? are some settings wrong or should i quickly buy a new hard drive and make a image of this and transfer it? I have no backups, only savegames but most of them are stored on my ssd which isn't failing (yet) on my 3TB hard drive I store my games only and some minor programs that are larger relative to other programs.

 

 

[BurstSMG]

Back it up immediately, and wait it out. Tell us what happens later

[Windows7ge]

When hard drives are dying they exhibit signs such as extreme performance loss. So it's possible that it's on it's way out. However before you go out and buy a new HDD do you have a free SATA port available on the motherboard? See what happens if you plug it into another port. There's an off chance it could be something else. If you move the HDD to another machine and do some read/write tests and they come back terrible then the drive is probably dying and you should look into a replacement ASAP if you have important data on it with no back-ups.

[Arcanekitten]

1 minute ago, Windows7ge said:

When hard drives are dying they exhibit signs such as extreme performance loss. So it's possible that it's on it's way out. However before you go out and buy a new HDD do you have a free SATA port available on the motherboard? See what happens if you plug it into another port. There's an off chance it could be something else. If you move the HDD to another machine and do some read/write tests and they come back terrible then the drive is probably dying and you should look into a replacement ASAP if you have important data on it with no back-ups.

well games aren't that of problem to lose only i have a 2MB/s download speed here so it would take my 7 days to redownload Everything and now that you i will imediatlly try a other sata connector since i had some issues with my ssd not being detected at some point it could be a bad sata port

[Windows7ge]

4 minutes ago, Arcanekitten said:

well games aren't that of problem to lose only i have a 2MB/s download speed here so it would take my 7 days to redownload Everything and now that you i will imediatlly try a other sata connector since i had some issues with my ssd not being detected at some point it could be a bad sata port

Who knows, the fault might very well lie with your motherboard but since you mentioned terrible grinding noises I'm willing to bet you're right on the money it's probably the HDD, but you still have to explore every possibility. Don't wanna buy a new HDD if your motherboard's as fault.

[Arcanekitten]

15 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Who knows, the fault might very well lie with your motherboard but since you mentioned terrible grinding noises I'm willing to bet you're right on the money it's probably the HDD, but you still have to explore every possibility. Don't wanna buy a new HDD if your motherboard's as fault.

[read whole comment please] Okay typing this on my phone it seems that my second pc is just fine....  Atheist I am seeing 60 MBPS write speeds and it sometimes dips to 600 KBPS but always goes up again to 20MBPS so its a but of a fluxation but its way better than my main pc where it shows under 1 mbps. BTW the read speeds are less but I am stressing it with a extracting tool so that to explain also no noises. 

 

WOW while writing this things have turned around suddenly I get the same problem really slow speeds...  Or could this have something to do with this being a game getting installed and its installing small files? I am still extracting it though... 

[Arcanekitten]

BTW keep in mind that this is a WD Green which run at 5400 rpm 

[Windows7ge]

7 hours ago, Arcanekitten said:

BTW keep in mind that this is a WD Green which run at 5400 rpm 

I have worked with WD Green drives before. Their real word performance is around 125MB/s-140MB/s if your drive is still having issues after switching ports and slow read/write speeds even after transferring it to another computer, or your extracting data to/from the drive and the speed tanks it's a sign that the drive could be dying. I'd back up your stuff and replace it.

 

P.S. Unlike a lot of people I have observed I take care to read comments fully before posting my reply. I'm with you >:).

[Arcanekitten]

4 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

I have worked with WD Green drives before. Their real word performance is around 125MB/s-140MB/s if your drive is still having issues after switching ports and slow read/write speeds even after transferring it to another computer, or your extracting data to/from the drive and the speed tanks it's a sign that the drive could be dying. I'd back up your stuff and replace it.

 

P.S. Unlike a lot of people I have observed I take care to read comments fully before posting my reply. I'm with you >:).

yeah some people just read a part and skip a lot and my previous comment was quite long.

so today CET I put my WD green back into my main rig and started it up and decided to run a benchmark to look if anything changed and I was surprised to find that it was running at the speeds you said a WD green would run at. also did a error scan but no bad sectors.

the only thing i did was swap a sata cable and used a other sata port.

So I'll do some more testing and just waiting to see if it works fine.

[Arcanekitten]

6 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

I have worked with WD Green drives before. Their real word performance is around 125MB/s-140MB/s if your drive is still having issues after switching ports and slow read/write speeds even after transferring it to another computer, or your extracting data to/from the drive and the speed tanks it's a sign that the drive could be dying. I'd back up your stuff and replace it.

 

P.S. Unlike a lot of people I have observed I take care to read comments fully before posting my reply. I'm with you >:).

Okay major update I just rebooted my pic and it now is "scanning and repairing drive D "  which is the drive I got a problem with. 

[Arcanekitten]

Also my drive before rebooting froze and wouldn't install or do anything. 

[Windows7ge]

6 hours ago, Arcanekitten said:

Also my drive before rebooting froze and wouldn't install or do anything. 

New port didn't help

New SATA cable didn't help (I forgot about that as a variable. Sometimes can be the culprit.)

Putting it in another computer still showed some problems (Drops in speed during speed testing)

Restarting windows results in windows checking the drive. (Although I have had that happen to me before. I'm not certain what windows has to see to trigger it but every drive I have had that happen to is sill running today.)

The drive freezes.

 

Have you backed up your data from it? These are signs of drive failure. HDD's often die slowly and give telltale signs that they're going, unlike SSD's which often die spontaneously and without very much warning.

[Arcanekitten]

3 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

New port didn't help

New SATA cable didn't help (I forgot about that as a variable. Sometimes can be the culprit.)

Putting it in another computer still showed some problems (Drops in speed during speed testing)

Restarting windows results in windows checking the drive. (Although I have had that happen to me before. I'm not certain what windows has to see to trigger it but every drive I have had that happen to is sill running today.)

The drive freezes.

 

Have you backed up your data from it? These are signs of drive failure. HDD's often die slowly and give telltale signs that they're going, unlike SSD's which often die spontaneously and without very much warning.

cant right now since its a national holiday and cant get any hard drives anywhere since stores are closed so tomorrow I am going to get a HDD from a local store.

[Arcanekitten]

20 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

New port didn't help

New SATA cable didn't help (I forgot about that as a variable. Sometimes can be the culprit.)

Putting it in another computer still showed some problems (Drops in speed during speed testing)

Restarting windows results in windows checking the drive. (Although I have had that happen to me before. I'm not certain what windows has to see to trigger it but every drive I have had that happen to is sill running today.)

The drive freezes.

 

Have you backed up your data from it? These are signs of drive failure. HDD's often die slowly and give telltale signs that they're going, unlike SSD's which often die spontaneously and without very much warning.

Currently cloning my HDD to another HDD which I just bought (WD Blue) already 50% done ill let you know if it finished successfully ^-^ 

[Arcanekitten]

23 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

New port didn't help

New SATA cable didn't help (I forgot about that as a variable. Sometimes can be the culprit.)

Putting it in another computer still showed some problems (Drops in speed during speed testing)

Restarting windows results in windows checking the drive. (Although I have had that happen to me before. I'm not certain what windows has to see to trigger it but every drive I have had that happen to is sill running today.)

The drive freezes.

 

Have you backed up your data from it? These are signs of drive failure. HDD's often die slowly and give telltale signs that they're going, unlike SSD's which often die spontaneously and without very much warning.

Just successfully cloned the old hard drive to the new one but there is one problem I need to use both of them in one session for a moment but my old drive gets the D: drive and the new one a new letter G: and when the old one is removed the new one gets D: how do i swap that? like the new one D: and the old one M: for example? I tried via disk management but i got a error saying "Invalid parameter" and the title being "management of virtual drives"

The new drive does change letter however.

 

I'll also ask the forum since you might not know it.

[Windows7ge]

34 minutes ago, Arcanekitten said:

Just successfully cloned the old hard drive to the new one but there is one problem I need to use both of them in one session for a moment but my old drive gets the D: drive and the new one a new letter G: and when the old one is removed the new one gets D: how do i swap that? like the new one D: and the old one M: for example? I tried via disk management but i got a error saying "Invalid parameter" and the title being "management of virtual drives"

The new drive does change letter however.

 

I'll also ask the forum since you might not know it.

It's been a while since I've done drive letter reassignment but I've been there with you when I've had more than 2 drives installed. I'd want my extra storage drive to specifically be D:\ and my boot drive C:\ but then extra drives and CD/DVD players would mess with it. Lets see if I can remember how.

 

if D:\ is used by disk 3 you cannot assign it to disk 2

Change disk 3 to any other letter

now D:\ can be assigned to disk 2

 

If that's not the solution it might have to do with your permissions. Are you the local administrator on your machine?

Also did you try restarting your computer and trying again immediately? It sounds like a dumb idea but you'd be surprised how often that has made things suddenly work for me.

[Arcanekitten]

Just now, Windows7ge said:

It's been a while since I've done drive letter reassignment but I've been there with you when I've had more than 2 drives installed. I'd want my extra storage drive to specifically be D:\ and my boot drive C:\ but then extra drives and CD/DVD players would mess with it. Lets see if I can remember how.

 

if D:\ is used by disk 3 you cannot assign it to disk 2

Change disk 3 to any other letter

now D:\ can be assigned to disk 2

 

If that's not the solution it might have to do with your permissions. Are you the local administrator on your machine?

Also did you try restarting your computer and trying again immediately? It sounds like a dumb idea but you'd be surprised how often that has made things suddenly work for me.

I fixed it in the meanwhile some guy on the forum suggested id try a third party tool and it worked ^-^ everything works now so

 

Thanks!