Ridiculously Slow HDD

[Destius]

So i was playing overwatch the other day and i noticed it took ridiculously long to load in game data (maps player characters etc) so i tried to move the game from one hdd to another and i noticed the speeds were at 700kb/s 1mb 4 mb 7 mb 8mb and thats as high as it got. an older hard drive  gets 100mb/s doing the same thing. what is wrong? the hdd has been moved once from my old case to my new one and it has been running fine for the last 4 years. any ideas? (it has not been dropped or damaged physically) i am currently trying to defragmentate it

[zwirek2201]

4 minutes ago, Fisting Master said:

So i was playing overwatch the other day and i noticed it took ridiculously long to load in game data (maps player characters etc) so i tried to move the game from one hdd to another and i noticed the speeds were at 700kb/s 1mb 4 mb 7 mb 8mb and thats as high as it got. an older hard drive  gets 100mb/s doing the same thing. what is wrong? the hdd has been moved once from my old case to my new one and it has been running fine for the last 4 years. any ideas? (it has not been dropped or damaged physically) i am currently trying to defragmentate it

Test it for bad sectors, you may also want to defragment it. HDD performance degrades after certain period of time.

[xc3ll]

Had the same issue, drove me insane!

After a few days of running the pc 24/7, the issue just resolved itself. It wasn't a hardware-fault, since the drive passed all tests and performed absolutely fine, when I plugged it into my linux machine. It was some really weird issue within windows 10, which caused latencies of a few seconds and only a few kbit/s performance. And no, it was no random system-process or AV-Scan saturating the drive. It was no filesystem error.

 

Just random incredibly low performance on one drive. 10 points to Microsoft for making their product worse than the previous ones...

 

edit: just to clarify the timeline:

1. drive performs terrible on windows machine.

2. removed drive, tested it under linux. performance fine, no fault detected (badblocks non-destructive test)

3. put drive back into windows machine, performs still terrible

4. Wait somewhat around 96hours of continous operation, drive works fine again

All without hot-plugging the drive (so many reboots in between)

[Destius]

3 minutes ago, zwirek2201 said:

Test it for bad sectors, you may also want to defragment it. HDD performance degrades after certain period of time.

i dont think that it is possible for a hard drive to go as far down to 700kb/s naturally. i am defragmentating it what else can i do?

 

[zwirek2201]

Just now, Fisting Master said:

i dont think that it is possible for a hard drive to go as far down to 700kb/s naturally. i am defragmentating it what else can i do?

 

It may also be a sign of failing drive. After 4 years I wouldn't be all that surprised, even if you didn't drop it. It could be caused by temperature, vibrations and many other things. I would test it in a different setup, if the problem is still there I would format it to get rid of eventual software errors and if it's still there, I have no clue but that the drive is failing.

[xc3ll]

1 minute ago, Fisting Master said:

i dont think that it is possible for a hard drive to go as far down to 700kb/s naturally. i am defragmentating it what else can i do?

 

Make a linux (ubuntu or so) live-cd/usb and boot into it. Check the drive performance. If its fine in linux, you'll just have to wait, I guess?

It's worth a shot, since it takes only a few minutes and if you have the same "bug" as I did, you'll go nuts otherwise

[Destius]

It got fixed by the defrgmentation tool thank god it actuall yworks now!

[kirashi]

5 hours ago, Fisting Master said:

So i was playing overwatch the other day and i noticed it took ridiculously long to load in game data (maps player characters etc) so i tried to move the game from one hdd to another and i noticed the speeds were at 700kb/s 1mb 4 mb 7 mb 8mb and thats as high as it got. an older hard drive  gets 100mb/s doing the same thing. what is wrong? the hdd has been moved once from my old case to my new one and it has been running fine for the last 4 years. any ideas? (it has not been dropped or damaged physically) i am currently trying to defragmentate it

I'm glad that defragging helped, however, I've experienced the same issue when loading up Overwatch from a Software RAID1/0 SSD array that gets 1100MB/s read speeds. As far as I'm concerned, it's something to do with the way the game loads content from your drive, aka poor optimization, since even on my SSD's it was only reading at a measly 1.3MB/s when characters and sounds were not loaded in-game at the start of the match.

[JacobFW]

FYI, to anyone else who has a hard drive that starts going really slow, you should try to back up your most critical files before doing a defrag (even if it's really slow).  Your hard drive slowing down can also be a sign of a dying drive.