Dead hard drive?? Help please

[ryan498]

My computer was purchased pre built roughly 5 years ago and has been dropping in performance over the past 2 years. Its socket is 1156 and processor is I3-550 running 4gb of 664mhz ram. I am building a whole new system mid next year. Recently ,as in the past day, the performance has dropped drastically. I believe this is because the hard drive but would like confirmation that it is. I can post benchmarks from my HDD they are as follows

 

[Multipack]

Run a SMART test and some disk diags with the HDD manufacturers software.

 

[leo2kp]

What kind of performance issues are you seeing? Game framerates are lower, or bootup slower?

 

[ryan498]

http://imgur.com/a/2HCpx

HDD Benchmarks

 

[rhysiam]

It's likely that your HDD is dying.

Absolute first priority is to make a backup/copy of any and all important data.

Do NOT run any benchmarks until you've got a reliable, and confirmed working copy of your important data.

Your disk may still last a while, but sometimes small errors escalate very quickly into a completely dead drive. The absolute last thing you want to do with a (possibly) dying drive that contains un-backed up data is run an intensive benchmark. That benchmark very well could finish the drive off.

 

[rhysiam]

Once you have a backup you can do some more diagnostic work.

That's a Seagate drive you have there. It's a good idea to use Seagate's own diagnostic software (it's called SeaTools), because different manufacturers sometimes use the SMART data in different ways. You can download it here: http://www.seagate.com/au/en/support/downloads/seatools/
Run the diagnostic tool and see what it says.

Just to clarify, that "Reallocated Sector Count" isn't necessarily too bad. Over the life of your drive it has discovered some bad sectors (18, in your case, as can be seen from the "data" column), but has successfully moved the data to reserve sectors. The good news is that the drive knows those sectors are "bad" and has marked them as such, making them completely invisible/inaccessible. They will not cause any further problems and there's no reason why a drive can't continue to run for years in this state.

If, however, that value continues to go up, particularly if it goes up quite rapidly, it's very likely that you have a much bigger problem. Make a note of the current value of 18, and monitor it as you go.