Question Bad HDD performance | HDD showing as an SSD in defraggler

[AALEXX203]

Hello all, my wife is currently using an old gaming PC of mine and it's safe to say it's on it's last legs. With the components being nearly 10 years old (AM3+ setup), you can understand it struggles to run games at good graphics. The issue I do have though currently is a relatively new HDD seems to be performing bad, it takes a long time to install games after a download, it takes a long time to do every day tasks etc. I have ran Userbenchmark to get a broad stroke of any issues it is having and it is saying my HDD is performing poor despite it being only a 1 year old seagate barracuda. I thought i might defrag the HDD to see if that might cause some form of improvement and when doing so, I noticed it is recognising it as an SSD. I have scanned the drive for errors and nothing has shown.

Any ideas how to fix the overall slowness and issues with the HDD?

Thanks for your response in advance.

Alex.

 

[AALEXX203]

Just to add, I do have my own healthy PC that I can utilise if necessary. For example, to add the new ssd as a secondary drive for something.

 

[AALEXX203]

I have installed windows 10 on the ssd using a laptop. After tinkering with it slightly the PC boots to Windows 10 with all hdds recognised. The problem is, that switching off problem has not stopped. I thought maybe it's the psu being close to the 500 watt limit so I removed two sticks of RAM. It seems to occur when something is clicked for example a key or a game is started. These clicks don't have to be significant even something like moving down on the bios. It's really frustrating as I'm completely lost to what the issue may be now.

Also, when this occurs I cannot turn the PC back on using the button. I need to flick the switch off and on first.

 

[Satan-IR]

Disconnect all disk.
Power up and enter the bios.
Does it power down and restart?

If not connect the hdd and retest just sitting in the bios.

Did you do what Bab.B said? I guess regardless of what storage is connected you should check if the system is able to POST and maintain its ON status in BIOS.

Also, when this occurs I cannot turn the PC back on using the button. I need to flick the switch off and on first.

That might be a PSU issue and having to power cycle the PSU (flip the switch on PSU?) to turn it on can point to a faulty or failing PSU. How old is it?

Can you check the system with other known working PSU? With PSU from the other system for example?

I have installed windows 10 on the ssd using a laptop.

This would show the SSD is working or not and it looks like it did but if you connected it to a laptop and installed Windows on the laptop, it won't work properly if you plug it in the desktop with all the different hardware. You'd have to do a clean install on the desktop to avoid a myriad of problems moving a Windows install on other hardware could cause.

 

[AALEXX203]

Did you do what Bab.B said? I guess regardless of what storage is connected you should check if the system is able to POST and maintain its ON status in BIOS.



That might be a PSU issue and having to power cycle the PSU (flip the switch on PSU?) to turn it on can point to a faulty or failing PSU. How old is it?

Can you check the system with other known working PSU? With PSU from the other system for example?


This would show the SSD is working or not and it looks like it did but if you connected it to a laptop and installed Windows on the laptop, it won't work properly if you plug it in the desktop with all the different hardware. You'd have to do a clean install on the desktop to avoid a myriad of problems moving a Windows install on other hardware could cause.

I'm attempting this now. It will be hard to measure if it is truly fixed as it can sometimes stay running for a long time before shutting off and it gave us time to install things on the pc to see if things were working.

The PSU is very old, maybe 2015. I have had them fail in the past too so I can't say they're completely reliable. Its an EVGA bronze 500 watt.

I could do, it would just mean I'd have to disassemble my current pc with all the cable management, I might buy one from amazon to see as it's probably more worth it then disassembling. I will try what Bob did first and get back to you. Thanks for all the help!!

 

[AALEXX203]

It stills restarts, even without any drives connected. I suppose it's looking like a psu issue.