HDD is suddenly very slow for no apparent reason.

[Angelouskos]

So I have a desktop PC with a 1TB Seagate hdd. About 3 days ago, the pc started to really slow down and i noticed that the disk usage in task manager was almost always at 100% while the centerpieces of the apps showing in the task manager didn't add up to 100%. The ram and cpu seem fine (around 40%). I've already disabled superfetch,windows search and DiskDiag . The hard disk has 180 GB free space and the whole rig is a year old. Can you please help me find a solution that doesn't involve getting an SSD since it was completely fine 3 days ago.

 

[seagate_surfer]

One thing you could try is running diagnostics on the drive, our free software is SeaTools. We recommend running the Long Generic scan, it takes awhile but it is the only one that scans all sectors of the drive, while shorter scans may be faster but only select sectors at random for testing.

 

[Solandri]

Check to see if you have a Windows Update waiting for a reboot to finish installing. I dunno why, but certain Windows updates which require a reboot to finish installing will grind your disk and eat up your CPU cycles while they're doing nothing but waiting for a reboot.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Disabling SuperFetch in Windows is detrimental to the performance of the PC. I wouldn't do that, and I would be leery of sources telling you to do so.

Have you opened Resource / Performance Monitor yet and checked out the Disk tab? It will pinpoint what's actively using the disk.

Task Manager doesn't always show every process from every user. If you're using a Home edition of Windows, look for a "Show All Tasks" button in Task Manager. Also, the numbers in the Task Manager columns are likely using rounding to make the data easier to read. I wouldn't take what it says as a precise measurement that's going to add up to 100. It will be very close, but if you want accuracy, use Resource / Performance Monitor. You'll probably see that the numbers change a lot faster than you could add them anyway.

 

[Angelouskos]

Check to see if you have a Windows Update waiting for a reboot to finish installing. I dunno why, but certain Windows updates which require a reboot to finish installing will grind your disk and eat up your CPU cycles while they're doing nothing but waiting for a reboot.

I couldn't see a windows update, but when I force-shut down the pc after it was being unresponsive, a windows update came up at start up. But I still have the same issue after the update was finished

 

[Angelouskos]

Disabling SuperFetch in Windows is detrimental to the performance of the PC. I wouldn't do that, and I would be leery of sources telling you to do so.

Have you opened Resource / Performance Monitor yet and checked out the Disk tab? It will pinpoint what's actively using the disk.

Task Manager doesn't always show every process from every user. If you're using a Home edition of Windows, look for a "Show All Tasks" button in Task Manager. Also, the numbers in the Task Manager columns are likely using rounding to make the data easier to read. I wouldn't take what it says as a precise measurement that's going to add up to 100. It will be very close, but if you want accuracy, use Resource / Performance Monitor. You'll probably see that the numbers change a lot faster than you could add them anyway.

Yeah , checking the task manager was the very thing I did, i couldnt see nothing that would have a huge impact and cause the 100% disk usage. I also couldn't find the button to show all processes but i did install process manager from sysinternals and couldnt find anything .

 

[Angelouskos]

One thing you could try is running diagnostics on the drive, our free software is SeaTools. We recommend running the Long Generic scan, it takes awhile but it is the only one that scans all sectors of the drive, while shorter scans may be faster but only select sectors at random for testing.

The tests come back as a pass

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

How your Task Manager appears will depend on which version of Windows you are running, but on the Performance tab, you should have a link to open the tool you need to investigate what is using your hard drive, if anything is.

Once Resource Monitor is running, switch to the Disk tab. You can sort the disk activity view by total bytes per second to see which process has the highest activity, and which file it is using.

If your disk has a high utilization, but you find almost no activity, your drive hardware could be malfunctioning. At this point, a tool to read and help you interpret the SMART data from your hard drive can be useful. I would recommend CrystalDiskInfo, which you can download from here. It's free and easy to use. Below is a screenshot showing a mix of healthy drives, along with an aging drive, and a failing drive. If your disk comes up as anything other than Good, you should consider replacing it or at the very least decommissioning it from holding any data that isn't properly backed up.

 

[Angelouskos]

How your Task Manager appears will depend on which version of Windows you are running, but on the Performance tab, you should have a link to open the tool you need to investigate what is using your hard drive, if anything is.

Once Resource Monitor is running, switch to the Disk tab. You can sort the disk activity view by total bytes per second to see which process has the highest activity, and which file it is using.

If your disk has a high utilization, but you find almost no activity, your drive hardware could be malfunctioning. At this point, a tool to read and help you interpret the SMART data from your hard drive can be useful. I would recommend CrystalDiskInfo, which you can download from here. It's free and easy to use. Below is a screenshot showing a mix of healthy drives, along with an aging drive, and a failing drive. If your disk comes up as anything other than Good, you should consider replacing it or at the very least decommissioning it from holding any data that isn't properly backed up.

Thanks, i opened resource manager but i couldnt see anything suspicious causing the 100% issue. This is what I got :

And this is what I got when i used Crystal Disk :

EDIT: When i hover over the CAUTION icon, it says Relocated sectors count 688 , pending sector count 288 and uncorrectable sector count 288.


Also, when I restarted it this morning, it was slow as usuall, but at some point my antivirus (WebRoot) asked for permission, then when I clicked yes, i got a bunch of windows saying that a thing under system32 , i think it was called WRsur or something along those lines, was not responding, and then everything went back to normal for a few minutes and got slow again after.

I am thinking of formatting the disk to see if it helps

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

What I get from your screen shot of CrystalDiskInfo is that your hard disk is headed south. It's spending time internally remapping sectors which have become unreliable. It needs to be replaced, unless you don't care about the performance impact that the degradation is going to cause, and don't mind the possibility of data loss or other system malfunctions.

Formatting by itself is a waste of your time at this point. Your hard drive has internal degradation that it is dealing with on it's own, and as a result, it has reduced performance and reliability. This sort of problem never gets better, only worse. The best you could hope for is to partition the drive in such a way that used space is well away from the affected area, but first you would have to figure out where that is. I would still decommission the drive unless given no choice.

 

[jr9]

I recommend you should backup the data on the drive and replace it as soon as possible. Bad sectors will only continue to grow. Bad sectors can't be fixed. You can run CHKDSK so Windows flags the sectors as bad and doesn't write to them however more will pop up. Data is important and should not be put on a device that is beginning to fail.

 

[Angelouskos]

What I get from your screen shot of CrystalDiskInfo is that your hard disk is headed south. It's spending time internally remapping sectors which have become unreliable. It needs to be replaced, unless you don't care about the performance impact that the degradation is going to cause, and don't mind the possibility of data loss or other system malfunctions.

Formatting by itself is a waste of your time at this point. Your hard drive has internal degradation that it is dealing with on it's own, and as a result, it has reduced performance and reliability. This sort of problem never gets better, only worse. The best you could hope for is to partition the drive in such a way that used space is well away from the affected area, but first you would have to figure out where that is. I would still decommission the drive unless given no choice.

Yep, you are right, the disk is definitely dying , now the bad sectors count has gone to 600. Just one more question, if i start completely fresh from a new drive with a fresh installation of windows, would i be able to operate the pc in order to download the hardware drivers ? Because i don't have the CD's with me, and it's kinda worrying me

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Theoretically, yes.

The ideal thing to do is, before you write off that drive, and if you're still able to boot into Windows, hop online and download drivers to a USB thumb drive for safe keeping, for when you reinstall Windows.

The most critical driver to have will be for your networking. Once that's installed into Windows, you can usually get any other drivers you need online. It's not uncommon for Windows to actually have a suitable network driver that it installs for you, but I wouldn't count on it doing so, in case you don't have a convenient means of downloading the network driver after you lose access to your current Windows installation.

After the network drivers, Graphics drivers are probably the only other major driver you need to worry about, unless you have a sound card that is unsupported, or is missing features without a particular driver package. I would manually install drivers on a case-by-case basis as needed after the new copy of Windows has been installed. The built-in drivers for most other devices aren't usually all that bad.