Computer very slow 100% HD usage

[carlos1251]

Two weeks ago my computer starting restarting out of nowhere. It restarted maybe 3 times in a row and then stopped. The following day it took a while to startup (5 minutes) and it has been oscillating between booting up normal (25s) and very slow (up to 5 minutes).

Whenever it takes up to 2 minutes to startup, I know I'm in for a ride. Programs take forever to open (when they open). I can't even open the Start menu to turn off the computer because it just doesn't open.

I tested the HDD with 4 different tools and it has no bad sectors. I've tried a new installation of windows but the problem continues.

I also got a new mobo battery and a new SATA cable, but it's still faulty.

Today I noticed that it was running at 100% usage but it had nothing but Task Manager open.

This HD is a year old. I'm posting screenshots of the HDTune benchmark and the disk usage on task manager.

Task Manager

HDTune Benchmark

Btw I'm on Windows 8.

 

[R_1]

The links are not working.

 

[carlos1251]

The links are not working.

Try again, I just updated it.

 

[rhysiam]

100% HDD active time with 0 data being read or written is a pretty solid indication your HDD is dying.

I know you've done a low-level sector scan (well, 4) which would usually expose some bad sectors. But that's not a perfect indicator of drive health.

Can you post the "health" tab of HD Tune?

 

[R_1]

Does the same behaviour show up in safe mode?
Have you tried an older/newer driver for the SATA controller?
have you tried all the SATA ports on the motherboard?
by new install you formatted the drive and reinstalled to a blank slate? or you installed on top of the previous install?
you have run the requisite scans with Malwarebytes and Spybot and an antivirus?

 

[carlos1251]

100% HDD active time with 0 data being read or written is a pretty solid indication your HDD is dying.

I know you've done a low-level sector scan (well, 4) which would usually expose some bad sectors. But that's not a perfect indicator of drive health.

Can you post the "health" tab of HD Tune?

Trying. The program becomes unresponsive. ._.

 

[carlos1251]

Does the same behaviour show up in safe mode?
Have you tried an older/newer driver for the SATA controller?
have you tried all the SATA ports on the motherboard?
by new install you formatted the drive and reinstalled to a blank slate? or you installed on top of the previous install?
you have run the requisite scans with Malwarebytes and Spybot and an antivirus?

I'm going to test it on Safe Mode rn.
No driver for the SATA controller available.
Yes, I tried them all.
Yes.
I'm downloading Malwarebytes rn.

Edit: on safe mode it doesn't show disk usage but I can tell it is still lagging.

 

[carlos1251]

100% HDD active time with 0 data being read or written is a pretty solid indication your HDD is dying.

I know you've done a low-level sector scan (well, 4) which would usually expose some bad sectors. But that's not a perfect indicator of drive health.

Can you post the "health" tab of HD Tune?

Here it is!

 

[damric]

Is this Windows 10? If so, this is typical (bad) behavior of when the OS starts up, wanting to scan everything, and at the same time tries to force install a ton of updates that you don't need, +telemetry. It can pretty much lock up even the fastest drives, even SSDs. You can disable all of that crap but it's tricky, some registry tweaks.

 

[rhysiam]

Here it is!

All is not well :-(

If you look at the data column (that's normally the one that matters) for Raw read error rate (01), Ultra DMA CRC Error Count (C7) and Write Error Rate (C8), it suggests there are problems.

53 read errors isn't a big deal, but those Ultra DMA and Write errors are massive numbers. Wait until next time the system hangs with 100% disk usage and check those values again... I suspect they will have gone up.

Understanding what these things actually mean is not straightforward. Some experts here on the forums will likely know a lot more about this than I do. However, I understand the Ultra DMA error can suggest a faulty controller or cable. But you say you've updated your drivers and swapped the cable already? The write errors point to a faulty drive head (dead drive), but to be honest taken together, I don't really know what specific issue that's pointing to. It's interesting that the Realloacted Event Count and Current Pending Sector are both 0, because they usually start to count up when a drive is failing.

Having said that, that SMART data does absolutely point to a low level hardware or driver issue. I don't believe malware or other issues can explain that. The drive itself is the most likely explanation.

Do you have another drive you can test with? If I was in your situation, once a drive has acted up like that I'm not going to trust it with an operating system or important data again anyway, I'd be replacing it.

 

[rhysiam]

Is this Windows 10? If so, this is typical (bad) behavior of when the OS starts up, wanting to scan everything, and at the same time tries to force install a ton of updates that you don't need, +telemetry. It can pretty much lock up even the fastest drives, even SSDs. You can disable all of that crap but it's tricky, some registry tweaks.

But if you look at the task manager screen shot there's 100% active time but no read or writes occurring on the disk.... absolutely none. The "normal" IO hammering that occurs on boot would result in a high response time and lots of small reads and writes, but not 0kb read/writes and "0" response time, probably immesurable because the disk isn't actually responding/doing anything as far as the OS can tell... Something is absolutely wrong here.

 

[carlos1251]

Here it is!

All is not well :-(

If you look at the data column (that's normally the one that matters) for Raw read error rate (01), Ultra DMA CRC Error Count (C7) and Write Error Rate (C8), it suggests there are problems.

53 read errors isn't a big deal, but those Ultra DMA and Write errors are massive numbers. Wait until next time the system hangs with 100% disk usage and check those values again... I suspect they will have gone up.

Understanding what these things actually mean is not straightforward. Some experts here on the forums will likely know a lot more about this than I do. However, I understand the Ultra DMA error can suggest a faulty controller or cable. But you say you've updated your drivers and swapped the cable already? The write errors point to a faulty drive head (dead drive), but to be honest taken together, I don't really know what specific issue that's pointing to. It's interesting that the Realloacted Event Count and Current Pending Sector are both 0, because they usually start to count up when a drive is failing.

Having said that, that SMART data does absolutely point to a low level hardware or driver issue. I don't believe malware or other issues can explain that. The drive itself is the most likely explanation.

Do you have another drive you can test with? If I was in your situation, once a drive has acted up like that I'm not going to trust it with an operating system or important data again anyway, I'd be replacing it.

No, I don't have another drive :/

This would be my second HD in a 2 year span. Do you think that maybe my motherboard could be the problem too? I've never seen someone buying so much HDD's in so little time.

 

[rhysiam]

No, I don't have another drive :/

This would be my second HD in a 2 year span. Do you think that maybe my motherboard could be the problem too? I've never seen someone buying so much HDD's in so little time.

It is certainly possible that it's your motherboard. 2 HDs dying in 2 years in unlucky, but it's far from unheard of. Unfortunately HDDs are, by some margin, the least reliable component in a computer. If I was to guess, I'd still say the odds are that your HDD has died.

What is your specific motherboard and CPU? Some motherboards offer additional SATA ports from a 3rd party SATA controller. If you have one, it would definitely be worth trying that, ideally with a fresh OS build, because that would mean you're using a different controller and you've already tested the cable. That would effectively isolate the HDD as the issue.

Try a few reboots until you get the bad-performance again. Then check the SMART data, have those values gone up? The values on their own aren't necessarily a bad thing, it's when they go up, especially rapidly, that you can be pretty sure you have a problem.

 

[carlos1251]

Is this Windows 10? If so, this is typical (bad) behavior of when the OS starts up, wanting to scan everything, and at the same time tries to force install a ton of updates that you don't need, +telemetry. It can pretty much lock up even the fastest drives, even SSDs. You can disable all of that crap but it's tricky, some registry tweaks.

No, I don't have another drive :/

This would be my second HD in a 2 year span. Do you think that maybe my motherboard could be the problem too? I've never seen someone buying so much HDD's in so little time.

It is certainly possible that it's your motherboard. 2 HDs dying in 2 years in unlucky, but it's far from unheard of. Unfortunately HDDs are, by some margin, the least reliable component in a computer. If I was to guess, I'd still say the odds are that your HDD has died.

What is your specific motherboard and CPU? Some motherboards offer additional SATA ports from a 3rd party SATA controller. If you have one, it would definitely be worth trying that, ideally with a fresh OS build, because that would mean you're using a different controller and you've already tested the cable. That would effectively isolate the HDD as the issue.

Try a few reboots until you get the bad-performance again. Then check the SMART data, have those values gone up? The values on their own aren't necessarily a bad thing, it's when they go up, especially rapidly, that you can be pretty sure you have a problem.

As of today every reboot has been the bad-performance one. =/

Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-78LMT-S2 Micro ATX AM3

CPU: AMD-FX6300

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

Can you try rebooting into Safe Mode and see if it still has the problems?

 

[carlos1251]

Can you try rebooting into Safe Mode and see if it still has the problems?

I dit it and it was still lagging.

 

[rhysiam]

As of today every reboot has been the bad-performance one. =/

Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-78LMT-S2 Micro ATX AM3

CPU: AMD-FX6300

No additional SATA controller on that mobo unfortunately.

Have you got another computer, of a friend's computer that you could pop that drive in and copy a bunch of data back-and-forth? Try some large files along with large folders made up of lots of small files.

I'm still of the mind that the drive is dying and it's at the point where if it was mine, I'd replace it. But if you do want to keep diagnosing, it's probably time to get it in a different machine. It's either the drive or the controller, and the easiest way to eliminate the controller is with a different machine.

 

[carlos1251]

As of today every reboot has been the bad-performance one. =/

Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-78LMT-S2 Micro ATX AM3

CPU: AMD-FX6300

No additional SATA controller on that mobo unfortunately.

Have you got another computer, of a friend's computer that you could pop that drive in and copy a bunch of data back-and-forth? Try some large files along with large folders made up of lots of small files.

I'm still of the mind that the drive is dying and it's at the point where if it was mine, I'd replace it. But if you do want to keep diagnosing, it's probably time to get it in a different machine. It's either the drive or the controller, and the easiest way to eliminate the controller is with a different machine.

Hey man, thanks for trying!
I'm gonna get a new HDD, it seems like the obvious solution.
If the problem persists I really don't know what to do. Would it be the mobo then?

Edit: Do you recommend me a HDD brand?

 

[rhysiam]

Hey man, thanks for trying!
I'm gonna get a new HDD, it seems like the obvious solution.
If the problem persists I really don't know what to do. Would it be the mobo then?

Edit: Do you recommend me a HDD brand?

You'd have to look at the SATA controller if the problem did persist with a new HDD. You can get PCIe SATA cards, they're not even that expensive. It can complicate things using them for a boot drive though if it's not natively supported by Windows 8. Still, that is an option that wouldn't require an entirely new system.

WD Blues are widely recommended. Good balance of price, performance and reliability.