Question HDD read speeds suddenly reduced.

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SteveBeds

Apr 27, 2022
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Hi,
I have a windows 11 PC. My C drive is an SSD and I have two HDDs installed.
One is used for back-ups and the other for multimedia files - video, music, photos etc..
About two months ago I noticed that I was having problems with the multimedia drive - see below:
File manager would take 2-3 seconds to populate if there were lots of files in the folder.
Videos would take longer to begin playing after double clicking them.
When I skipped through larger videos, playback would stutter while the player caught up.
If I was browsing the disk at the same time as watching a larger HD video, the playback became choppy and stuttered.
Copying files to other folders on the same drive began to take longer, and playing videos while doing so was impossible as they just froze.

I have DeFraggler installed and know from previous measurements that it would report random read speeds of about 70 MB/s for the SSD and 40 MB/s tops for the two HDDs.

Now, running the same test on the multimedia HHD, I consistently got read speeds of 1-2 MB/s - the other two were not showing reduced speed.

Searching online I found articles suggesting a change of SATA cable and trying a different SATA port, both of which I tried and got no change in results.

Having just stopped using a NAS drive I had a spare Western Digital NAS HHD and so I copied over my files and swapped out the multimedia HHD.

For the first few days I would get a benchmark of about 70 MB/s on the new drive.

However I am now getting the same problems as before - only affecting the multimedia drive.

I have not installed any new software - apart from Windows updates, or changed any settings in Windows.

Any suggestions would be great, thanks.
 
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SteveBeds said:
Hi,
I have a windows 11 PC. My C drive is an SSD and I have two HDDs installed.
One is used for back-ups and the other for multimedia files - video, music, photos etc..
About two months ago I noticed that I was having problems with the multimedia drive - see below:
File manager would take 2-3 seconds to populate if there were lots of files in the folder.
Videos would take longer to begin playing after double clicking them.
When I skipped through larger videos, playback would stutter while the player caught up.
If I was browsing the disk at the same time as watching a larger HD video, the playback became choppy and stuttered.
Copying files to other folders on the same drive began to take longer, and playing videos while doing so was impossible as they just froze.

I have DeFraggler installed and know from previous measurements that it would report random read speeds of about 70 MB/s for the SSD and 40 MB/s tops for the two HDDs.

Now, running the same test on the multimedia HHD, I consistently got read speeds of 1-2 MB/s - the other two were not showing reduced speed.

Searching online I found articles suggesting a change of SATA cable and trying a different SATA port, both of which I tried and got no change in results.

Having just stopped using a NAS drive I had a spare Western Digital NAS HHD and so I copied over my files and swapped out the multimedia HHD.

For the first few days I would get a benchmark of about 70 MB/s on the new drive.

However I am now getting the same problems as before - only affecting the multimedia drive.

I have not installed any new software - apart from Windows updates, or changed any settings in Windows.

Any suggestions would be great, thanks.
Click to expand...
Post a screenshot from crystaldiskinfo for this suspect disk.
 
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SteveBeds said:
Hi,
I have a windows 11 PC. My C drive is an SSD and I have two HDDs installed.
One is used for back-ups and the other for multimedia files - video, music, photos etc..
About two months ago I noticed that I was having problems with the multimedia drive - see below:
File manager would take 2-3 seconds to populate if there were lots of files in the folder.
Videos would take longer to begin playing after double clicking them.
When I skipped through larger videos, playback would stutter while the player caught up.
If I was browsing the disk at the same time as watching a larger HD video, the playback became choppy and stuttered.
Copying files to other folders on the same drive began to take longer, and playing videos while doing so was impossible as they just froze.

I have DeFraggler installed and know from previous measurements that it would report random read speeds of about 70 MB/s for the SSD and 40 MB/s tops for the two HDDs.

Now, running the same test on the multimedia HHD, I consistently got read speeds of 1-2 MB/s - the other two were not showing reduced speed.

Searching online I found articles suggesting a change of SATA cable and trying a different SATA port, both of which I tried and got no change in results.

Having just stopped using a NAS drive I had a spare Western Digital NAS HHD and so I copied over my files and swapped out the multimedia HHD.

For the first few days I would get a benchmark of about 70 MB/s on the new drive.

However I am now getting the same problems as before - only affecting the multimedia drive.

I have not installed any new software - apart from Windows updates, or changed any settings in Windows.

Any suggestions would be great, thanks.
Click to expand...
Open Command Prompt as an Adminstrator and enter: wmic diskdrive get status

This will check ur current SMART status of all drives. Most probably your Raw_Read_Error_Rate flags must have an issue.
 
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