Dying hard drive?

[Otto Dafe]

So, about a week and a half ago my system slowed down dramatically. Windows took about 10x as long to load--basically anything disk based takes a really long time. Hadn't changed anything HW/SW-wise except for swapping a stick of 512 ddr133 for a 2GB kit of ddr200, didn't seem related. Long story short I began to suspect that the drive is getting tons of read errors but eventually coming up with the goods, and thus performance is degrading.

Ran a bench and lo and behold the linear read is ~1MB/s, random is half that. A few questions arise: is this theory even possible(I've never had a drive die in an error free but super slow fashion before, they've always just spazzed out)? Could it be a virus or something(seems unlikely to me, as it slows down windows boot? Also, anything SMART can tell me here, I never know what to look for.

 

[BRiT]

If this is an EIDE drive, make sure its enabled for UltraDMA mode in BIOS. Also make sure the cpu multiplier didnt get changed to something lower.

 

[Otto Dafe]

If this is an EIDE drive, make sure its enabled for UltraDMA mode in BIOS. Also make sure the cpu multiplier didnt get changed to something lower.

Yeah it's in udma mode 5, as it has been, and the CPU is at it's usual stock speed. I was just looking at a SMART utility and it's telling me everything's ok, but I usually have SMART disabled, so I don't know if that's valid. One other thing, I've been watching a disk activity log and there seem to be about 10 or 20 writes per second when I'm doing absolutely nothing, all programs closed. That could be windows mucking around in the background, but it seems a bit odd since the pagefile is not on that disk.

 

[vazel]

The manufacturer of your HDD should have a utility you can run off a floppy at boot to check the health of your drive. If that passes I'd say there's just something wrong with your Windows install.

 

[Otto Dafe]

The manufacturer of your HDD should have a utility you can run off a floppy at boot to check the health of your drive. If that passes I'd say there's just something wrong with your Windows install.

Waitaminute, Windows has it in PIO mode. Why on earth would it decide to do that? I'm going to double check the BIOS .

 

[vazel]

That's something Windows handles. Check this page. http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx

 

[Otto Dafe]

Aha, I thought the six cumulative errors stepdown thing was only for optical drives. I actually did a registry hack instead of uninstalling the IDE controller so I'd only have to restart once , but same net result--every thing's fine now. Thanks guys.