Question HDD behaves very strangely

[Zoom77]

Hello,

I had HDD failures before, but now I am experiencing something which seems very strange.

Yesterday evening (Thursday) I suddenly got a Windows 10 message saying "Restart To Repair Drive Errors" about my F: drive, which at that point became inaccessible. I restarted, and I decided that I should start backing up my data from that drive (those that were not backed up already). It was very slow and soon after I got the same "Restart To Repair Drive Errors" again. I did, and then I also run the "chkdsk /f F:" command.

After that, I continued backing up, it was very slow (sometimes going faster, and then pausing or crawling) , and some times files would fail to be copied. Even opening directories on this drive was sometimes very slow, and it would slow down my whole computer even though this is just a media drive and my CPU load was nearly idle.

I continued backing up this morning, with the same issues, but gradually during the day, it got better! Now it is faster, files that previously failed to be copied now they do, no problem in opening directories, etc. This without me doing anything, not even restarting the computer.

Is this the drive failing, or could it be something else? It seems very strange to get better on its own, so I now worry that there might be an underlying problem elsewhere.

** 2 days earlier (Tuesday) I installed a new video card (Rtx 2070) and new Nvidia drivers. Then I run a benchmark ( PC UserBenchmark) which also benchmarks the drives. Could this be related? The issue appeared more than 24 hours later.

 

[RealBeast]

Can't comment on the recent video card change (seems unlikely), but I have had a number of old heavily used (ex-RAID array drives repurposed at 4-5 years until death) 3-8TB enterprise drives caused similar issues. Since I have multiple backups, I usually just pull them and toss 'em.

If they were still under warranty I would run the HDD tool from the manufacturer website and RMA them when they fail.

One easy thing to do is go into the bios and disable that particular SATA port to see if that solves the issue - if so it is clearly the drive and you can proceed accordingly.

 

[Zoom77]

Thanks. The drive must be about 5 years old, but it wasn't used that heavily. When you say "similar issues" do you mean being very slow, failing to copy files, and then improving on their own? Because it is this "improvement" that is making me worry.

The rest of my PC works fine. It is only when this drive transfers files and it gets stuck that the whole PC might be slowed down for some reason. So I don't think I will learn anything new by disabling the drive.

Could this be PSU related? When I got the 2070 (not super, not OC) I was worried that my 520W mid tier Antec PSU might not be sufficient. However when I put full load on both GPU and CPU at the same time everything works fine, so I assume it would be very strange for an HDD to have power issues while everything else is idling.