seagate hard drive failure?

  • Thread starter Thread starter laniik
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laniik

Hi. As of two days ago, my computer all of a sudden experienced a huge
slowdown, in basically everything I do. I have wracked my brains
trying to figure out what could have caused this. I know windows tends
to slow down in the long run, but this was a very sudden decrease.

My first instinct was spyware, but I ran a bunch of spyware tests and
checked the running processes.

My second guess was memory, but I checked my memory, yup still good.

Maybe its a mechanical hard drive failure? Everything works, but my
system drive seems suspiciously slow. I have a Seagate 300gb
ST3300631A drive. I ran a drive speed test program, and found that the
drive averages 6000kb/sec write and 3500kb/sec read. Are these speeds
abnormally slow? they sound slow to me. If so, does anyone know what I
could try next?

Thanks!
 
laniik said:
Hi. As of two days ago, my computer all of a sudden experienced a huge
slowdown, in basically everything I do. I have wracked my brains
trying to figure out what could have caused this. I know windows tends
to slow down in the long run, but this was a very sudden decrease.

My first instinct was spyware, but I ran a bunch of spyware tests and
checked the running processes.

My second guess was memory, but I checked my memory, yup still good.

Maybe its a mechanical hard drive failure? Everything works, but my
system drive seems suspiciously slow. I have a Seagate 300gb
ST3300631A drive. I ran a drive speed test program, and found that the
drive averages 6000kb/sec write and 3500kb/sec read. Are these speeds
abnormally slow? they sound slow to me. If so, does anyone know what I
could try next?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

One of the most important things is to check see what may be running
behind your back or what eating up the CPU time. If you are running WinXP
(other Windows may have similar option).

- Run "Task Manager" and check to see what's running and which is eating up
the CPU and go from there.
 
laniik said:
Hi. As of two days ago, my computer all of a sudden experienced a huge
slowdown, in basically everything I do. I have wracked my brains
trying to figure out what could have caused this. I know windows tends
to slow down in the long run, but this was a very sudden decrease.

My first instinct was spyware, but I ran a bunch of spyware tests and
checked the running processes.

My second guess was memory, but I checked my memory, yup still good.

Maybe its a mechanical hard drive failure? Everything works, but my
system drive seems suspiciously slow. I have a Seagate 300gb
ST3300631A drive. I ran a drive speed test program, and found that the
drive averages 6000kb/sec write and 3500kb/sec read. Are these speeds
abnormally slow? they sound slow to me. If so, does anyone know what I
could try next?

Thanks!
Click to expand...


If you think it might be the hard drive failing then download and run
Seagate's drive testing program. It is free and it is quick.
 
If you think it might be the hard drive failing then download and run
Seagate's drive testing program. It is free and it is quick.
Click to expand...

I ran the drive checks and there are no errors that show up, but if
anything it would just be a slowness problem (maybe a lot of read
errors? slow spin speed?) not bad sectors or anything that would show
up on a drive test.

- Run "Task Manager" and check to see what's running and which is eating up
the CPU and go from there.
Click to expand...

i looked at all running processes and everything seems fine. whats more
is that my cpu load doesnt seem to be that high. thats why i assumed it
was some kind of hardware i/o problem (maybe drive related).

thanks

oliver
 
laniik said:
As of two days ago, my computer all of a sudden experienced
a huge slowdown, in basically everything I do. I have wracked
my brains trying to figure out what could have caused this.
I know windows tends to slow down in the long run,
Click to expand...

XP doesnt.
but this was a very sudden decrease.
Click to expand...
My first instinct was spyware, but I ran a bunch of
spyware tests and checked the running processes.
Click to expand...
My second guess was memory, but I checked my memory, yup still good.
Click to expand...
Maybe its a mechanical hard drive failure?
Click to expand...

Yes, you can get that effect if its retrying on bad sectors and succeeding eventually.
That doesnt appear to be your problem tho since the Seagate diags dont see any problem.
Everything works, but my system drive seems suspiciously slow. I have
a Seagate 300gb ST3300631A drive. I ran a drive speed test program,
Click to expand...
< and found that the drive averages 6000kb/sec write and 3500kb/sec read.
Are these speeds abnormally slow? they sound slow to me.
Yes.

If so, does anyone know what I could try next?
Click to expand...

Check if DMA is being used for that drive. Win will turn DMA off when it
sees a number of errors in comms to the drive, for the safety of your data.
Thats usually due to a bad cable and is the first thing to try if DMA is off.
You will need to manually turn DMA on again if that is the problem.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472/

If DMA is on, see what the speed of the cpu is being reported as.
You can see the bios have a massive brain fart and run the cpu at
way below the speed its supposed to be running it at and get that
very noticeable slowdown. If that the problem, try resetting the
cmos and if that doesnt fix it, try replacing the cmos battery.

You can also see the system deliberately slowed down because
its overheating. Check the cpu temp with something like speedfan
and if thats way too high, check for fur in the cpu fan and that its
actually rotating at the correct speed etc.
 
laniik said:
I ran the drive checks and there are no errors that show up, but if
anything it would just be a slowness problem (maybe a lot of read
errors? slow spin speed?) not bad sectors or anything that would show
up on a drive test.



i looked at all running processes and everything seems fine. whats more
is that my cpu load doesnt seem to be that high. thats why i assumed it
was some kind of hardware i/o problem (maybe drive related).

thanks

oliver
Click to expand...

CPU is usually the only problem I have with system slowness problem I may
run into once awhile at my end. If you think that the hard drive is slower
than before then defrag may speed it up a little. But from my little
experience that system slowless usually cause by some program either

- Easting up most of the system resource (or CPU) that the system doesn't
have enough for other to run. Or more program(s) trying to fight for CPU

- Or some ap's may need to have the "Priority" set higher for it to speedup
the process then to release the CPU back to system for other to use.

My own experience.

- I am using BNR2 as binary downloader, and I find BNR2 and the whole system
run faster *if* I set the "Priority" to "HIGH".

- When converting multimedia or DVD authoring then I set to the converteror
DVD author to "Below Normal"

- And never set the Anti-Virus program to scan email (I guess because it may
scan databases of Usenet that I sometime have up to 10-20GB (right now I
have reduced to around 4GB). Or few times I had it enabled by accident and
it caused slowness to the whole system.
 
laniik said:
I ran the drive checks and there are no errors that show up, but if
anything it would just be a slowness problem (maybe a lot of read
errors? slow spin speed?) not bad sectors or anything that would show
up on a drive test.
Click to expand...

I had the same problem with a Seagate SATA 150, ran the diagnostic test
and was advised that the errors were acceptable but the drive was
taking 30 minutes to unrar a DVD, when it usually takes two minutes.
Didn't contact Seagate for an RMA because the drive was purchased from
a shop that went out of business.

The weird part about this incident is that O&O Defrag and Window's was
not able to defrag the partitions. This happened a couple months ago
and I can't remember the exact error message.
 
I had the same problem with a Seagate SATA 150, ran the diagnostic test
and was advised that the errors were acceptable but the drive was
taking 30 minutes to unrar a DVD, when it usually takes two minutes.
Didn't contact Seagate for an RMA because the drive was purchased from
a shop that went out of business.

The weird part about this incident is that O&O Defrag and Window's was
not able to defrag the partitions. This happened a couple months ago
and I can't remember the exact error message.
Click to expand...


Hm interesting. actually, I found the error, and its tremendously
anticlimactic. In trying to remember what had changed on my system
since the slowdown, I found out that the problem actually came from an
installation of winamp 5.32. For some my computer had a huge allergic
reaction to the new winamp, even when *not* currently running. Even
with the winamp monitor (startup thing) off it was still slow.

I cant explain it, but after removing the program entirely and
downgrading to 2.9, my computer is running smooth again.

thanks for the help!

oliver
 
Hm interesting. actually, I found the error, and its tremendously
anticlimactic. In trying to remember what had changed on my system
since the slowdown, I found out that the problem actually came from an
installation of winamp 5.32. For some my computer had a huge allergic
reaction to the new winamp, even when *not* currently running. Even
with the winamp monitor (startup thing) off it was still slow.

I cant explain it, but after removing the program entirely and
downgrading to 2.9, my computer is running smooth again.

thanks for the help!

oliver
Click to expand...

Thanks for posting the solution. Lots of times no one ever hears the
outcome. I was going to suggest you take a look at your device
manager and DMA settings. I had a similar slowdown because my
computer/disk drives didn't get along well and I would configure to
Ultra DMA but after a few days it would cough and switch to PIO. I
changed cables and it finally stopped doing it.
 
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