What's wrong with my HDD?

will · Jan 9, 2009

I bought a Samsung F1 1TB a while ago and it was great, really fast and stable. Recently I bought another one because I ran out of space. I installed windows on it and filled it up with music, games and films. Ever since I got it, it has seemed really sluggish. My PC just feels like a crappy old one, firefox takes about 15 seconds just to pop up, and seems really laggy and freezy when I use it. I was thinknig about RMAing it but I can just see the testers plugging it in and it 'working' (albeit slow) so they send it back and I just wasted £10 on postage.
Just now I plugged both of the drives into my PC and did an HDtach benchy on both, one straight after the other. I had no programs open and the PC was idling. Here are the results:

Old HDD:

New HDD:

As you can see something is clearly wrong... Any ideas? :confused:

I might try another Sata port to make sure but I doubt that is the cause.
I copied a film from the old one to the new one, the transfer rate was 3.89-3.91 MB/s for some reason... :mad:

silkstone · Jan 9, 2009

Highly fragmented? Too many partitions? i have the same problem only not to the same extent, no idea what causes it. Only shows up in HD tach tho, my pc doesn't slow down at all.

Also if you've just installed vista, it may be the search indexer doing it's job

will · Jan 9, 2009

I frequently defragment with defraggler and there's only one partition on the drive. Vista has been installed for nearly 4 months so I dont think it's the indexer (also got similar results when I tested it on another pc).
Any other suggestions?

erocker · Jan 9, 2009

I think it IS the indexer. Try turning indexing off and see what you get.

silkstone · Jan 9, 2009

will said:
I frequently defragment with defraggler and there's only one partition on the drive. Vista has been installed for nearly 4 months so I dont think it's the indexer (also got similar results when I tested it on another pc).
Any other suggestions?

I thought you just installed windows onto the new drive? Do as erocker says. run>services.msc the find the indexer service and disable it. restart and test again. see what happens. After be sure to re-enable it tho as it's a useful service

alexp999 · Jan 9, 2009

Indexer is a rubbish service IMO. I have it disabled so it cant touch any of my drives. It slows your PC, provides virtually no benefit in searches and hammers away at your HDD all the time.
It probably is that.

The service you are looking for is Windows Search.
Find it in the services.msc window and right click and stop and disable it.

erocker · Jan 9, 2009

Indexing service is only useful if you have a lot of data and do a lot of searching.

will · Jan 10, 2009

Well I disabled the indexer, restarted and checked it wasnt running, but the same results. Im pretty sure it's not a program or service that's causing the problem as in the performance monitor the disk usage is at 0 and transfer rate is 0KB/s. Im thinking it's a hardware issue, maybe a conflict ot something?

erocker · Jan 10, 2009

Have you tried using a different SATA port?

Altered · Jan 10, 2009

Possibly a SATA cable gone bad or not plugged in good? Try another cable or reverse them. Did you check in the bios to see of both drives were set up the exact same way?

will · Jan 10, 2009

I tried all the other ports on the mobo and a different cable, it didnt help but for some reason when windows loaded up it was thrashing the hd like mad for some reason, apparently it was svchost.exe reading a load of random files for some weird reason... windows defender is switched off, the indexer was disabled and i dont have any antivirus or anything (not that that would be using svchost anyway...), does anyone know what svchost.exe does?
Anyway I just plugged the hd into another computer and ran hdtach, these are the results:

It looks better but still a bit weird...
I tried copying a 5gb file from it to the WD5000AAKS that the comp was running from, I got 75MB/s transfer to start with, but it then decreased to about 40mb/s, which seemed ok.

silkstone · Jan 10, 2009

The thrashing at startup is probably pre-fetch service. I'm still not sure what causes it at random times tho. sometimes my computer becomes unusable for 30 mins due to disk activity and it isn't the indexer service.
Your HD tach screen now looks identical to mine.

will · Jan 10, 2009

It could be the prefetch, I dunno though. I had this exact same hard drive model before and had no issues with it, this was with the same hardware and same operating system. Im pretty sure prefetch doesnt slow your system to these speeds. Even just on google in firefox when I type a word it takes a few seconds just for it to come up, its really jerky... So annoying! I might do a reinstall tbh to see if that fixes the problem. I wont be able to format it though, I have nowhere to backup all my stuff :ohwell:

Altered · Jan 10, 2009

What is svchost.exe And Why Is It Running?
Try that link.

lemonadesoda · Jan 10, 2009

will said:
i dont have any antivirus or anything (not that that would be using svchost anyway...), does anyone know what svchost.exe does?

LOL

1./ Get yourself an antivirus. At a minimum get a trial one running and check that PC
2./ svchost.exe is a "runtime host" for services and DLLs. It is the first place you should consider a virus to hide!

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What's wrong with my HDD?

will

silkstone

will

erocker

*

silkstone

alexp999

Staff

erocker

*

will

erocker

*

Altered

will

silkstone

will

Altered

lemonadesoda

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