Could my 160gb 3.5 Drive be dying?

[Matt Wick]

ok so i have a 160gb seagate internal drive that i THINK may be on the verge of perhaps dying.
now before i list what it's doing... my system specs are:
Windows 7 Ultimate x64
16gb ram (though i think i've got a couple bad sticks, i just have to test that theory so in reality it's only reading like 12 or so)
160gb seagate main drive
2x 1tb slaves
gigabyte mobo
Nvidia Geforce GTX 660ti 3gb vram
AMD 6 core (don't know the speed off hand)
750w single rail psu
now i'm not totally sure but it's showing some odd symptoms like for instance
my system is CRAWLING it's gotten so slow at times
that includes my net brower and windows explorer and anything else tied to the drive
my games have started to have massive lag and frame drops
and if my table gets jarred hard enough while it's on, the whole thing reboots
i'm not hearing any Clicking thankfully so maybe a reformat might remedy this
but again i wanna get some opinions before i just start assuming and go and waste money that i can't afford to spend
what do you guys think?
thanks in advance

 

[FLanighan]

Well sir it seems the problem is that you don't have enough ram. I suggest buying an extra 16gb kit of DDR3-1066 as that will give your computer a super speedy boost of adrenaline that will blow away your gaming performance by offering up to 4x the framerate without any of that horrible lag you're describing. RAM is the most important part of your computer and any slowness you have will almost always be fixed by getting more of it. There's a small chance it could be your hard drive but MOST LIKELY not.

 

[Matt Wick]

hmmm... ok. it's just that they've never done it this bad before
and damn i forgot to mention what TYPE of ram i had -_-
it's 16gb of corsair vengeance 1866 (though it's only reading at 1333 at least the sticks that work which i can't figure out how to fix for the life of me)

 

[Matt Wick]

also is it possible for ram to be dual channel but then somehow get switched to single?
if so, how do i fix it?
and i do indeed have ONE bad stick in the second slot
so i'm gonna tweak around a bit see i can't get this worked out
still open to ideas though

 

[Matt Wick]

well i guess i fixed my issue lol...
i took out 2 sticks of my ram and it clocked up to 1866 jsut fine with with remaining two
that's my bad... i didnt realize the more sticks you have the slower it runs heh.
and my hdd is fine... i ran some tests and it's cool

 

[festerovic]

If you didnt realize, FLAnighan was trolling. RAM is the least needed thing in a gaming machine after 4gigs are in it, there is little to no difference after 16g certainly....

My tip : Get memtest86 and make a boot Cd out of it (images are found at their website). Run it for 2 passes on each stick installed separately, then run it once with all the RAM installed. make sure you are selecting the whole range of memory space in the options.

Unless you fill the drive with data once, you won't know if it's bad. The only certain test is to fill it, then copy everything to another drive, looking for read or write errors in the Event Viewer.