Extremely sluggish loading of files and occasional Read error on startup

[Luke Hector]

Hi

For a while my Media HDD has been sluggish like hell. Video and music files take ages to load and play and sometimes hang and when you try to skip ahead they hang or crash, it's just really bad. And I have the files separated into sub folders to make indexing easier.

However I'm also getting Read errors when I start up the PC. Forces me to restart the system and sometimes it will simply bypass it and sometimes it will take several attempts.

Now what's odd about the last error is that the Media HDD isn't even my boot drive. My SSD is. So how can that have an effect.

On Crystal Disk Info, the boot drive says it's fine, but the Media HDD has a couple of cautions on it. I have a screen shot and if I can find a way to attach it to this thread I will.

Is it time to backup and replace that HDD?

Can't seem to attach a picture file but the errors on the Crystal Disk Info highlight Caution on:

Current Pending Sector Count
Uncorrectable Sector Count

 

[PhatLloyd]

Back up and replace.
Listen to your case, can you hear a tap/tick sound? If you do, hard drive failure is close, best to back up.
TO me it looks like the drive is failing to read which could be that the drive is either heavily fragmented or the disk is not reading and writing data fast enough.

 

[LordConrad]

Agreed. You might try running SpinRite on the disc to correct sector and read errors, but backup the disc first.

 

[fzabkar]

SpinRite and HDD Regenerator are very bad for damaged drives.

See http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=28780

Instead I would use a tool such as ddrescue to clone your drive, sector by sector. Ddrescue keeps a log so that it can resume after an interruption. It also understands how to work around bad media.

 

[LordConrad]

SpinRite and HDD Regenerator are very bad for damaged drives.

Which is why I recommended the backup. Sectors are marked as "Bad" for two reasons:

1) The magnetic signal becomes degraded to the point where the hard drive error correction "times out" before it can recover any data. This is where SpinRite really shines because it ignores the hard drive's "time out" and reads and analyzes each bad sector about 2,000 times to recover every bit possible.

2) The surface of the drive is physically damaged. In this case you're pretty much screwed unless you're willing to pay gobs of money to a specialized data retrieval company, and there's no guarantee on what or how much data will be recovered.

Unless a hard drive begins making grinding or clicking sounds, The first reason is usually the culprit, which is why I recommend SpinRite (after making a backup, just in case the damage is physical).

 

[Luke Hector]

Is it easy to pick out the click/tap sounds amongst all the other noises a PC case makes in general?

 

[LordConrad]

Is it easy to pick out the click/tap sounds amongst all the other noises a PC case makes in general?

Unless you have a bunch of fans in your case running at full blast, you'll definitely hear the noises of a damaged hard drive. It's rare for a physically damaged hard drive to not make noises that are loud enough to be heard.

 

[PhatLloyd]

Just listen near the bottom front, it will sound similar to a pen being tapped against something. If you do hear it it's VERY bad news.

 

[DataMedic]

fzabkar is right, don't use SpinRite unless you just want to put your hard drive out of it's misery. SpinRite does nothing more than chkdisk, it forces the drive to repeatedly hit bad sectors so the drive will hopefully remap them (losing the data in the process) and usually kills drives.

ddrescue is the way to go. trust me fzabkar and I are both data recovery professionals.

 

[LordConrad]

fzabkar is right, don't use SpinRite unless you just want to put your hard drive out of it's misery. SpinRite does nothing more than chkdisk, it forces the drive to repeatedly hit bad sectors so the drive will hopefully remap them (losing the data in the process) and usually kills drives.

ddrescue is the way to go. trust me fzabkar and I are both data recovery professionals.

I don't know how you used SpinRite, but I've NEVER had it lose any data from weak sectors (marked as bad). It ALWAYS recovers the data in the original usable format, unless the damage is physical in which case nothing will fix it.

 

[fzabkar]

The HDD Guru thread demonstrates that SpinRite and HDD Regenerator "recover" bogus data. This results in insidious corruption. Specifically, in the case of the latter, a DATA sector was replaced with a piece of the drive's FIRMWARE.

Go to SpinRite's web site and have a look at the screenshots. The largest drive is a 200MB model. Yes, that's right, MEGAbytes, not GIGAbytes.

 

[Luke Hector]

I can barely hear any different than the normal "clicks" i think the machine makes anyway. However I'm going to get a new drive because not only does the slow nature of the drive annoy me, but for some reason it's screwing up my boot routine. Even though the drive isn't my Windows drive, the fact the PC can't read off it is constantly bringing in the "A Disk Read Error occured, press CTRL ALT DELETE to restart" and it can take several times to start up. That alone makes me want to replace the drive entirely.

 

[DataMedic]

These SpinRite freaks just won't quit. I swear they pay people to post these crackpot responses on every forum.

 

[LordConrad]

These SpinRite freaks just won't quit. I swear they pay people to post these crackpot responses on every forum.

Excuse you. Just because I believe in a piece of software that has never caused me problems doesn't make me a freak. If you've had problems with it then feel free to use whatever software you like, But SpinRite has always worked flawlessly for me, and I will continue to use it until that changes. Go troll somewhere else.