My Hard Drive suddenly has a read speed of 10MB/s. Replace or Fix?

[Raven A]

My 2 year old Toshiba 2TB Hard Drive has suddenly got extremely low read speeds. Using CrystalDiskMark, the seq q32t1 speed is 31MB/s (which is already really slow), but the 4K speed is as low as 0.013MB/s. The write speeds are around 30MB/s. Understandably this makes the programs installed on this drive extremely sluggish. My other drives, both SSDs, perform normally at around 500MB/s.

Is it time to replace the drive, or is there a way to fix this?

 

[dudeman509]

Download a utility to check out the drive's SMART status (I have something called HD Sentinel, and there are many others out there).

See what disk usage % is when idle - maybe Windows is doing something in the background (W10 is known to do this).

My first thought would be that something is thrashing that disk in the background with R/W activity...unless the disk is on its way out (SMART status *should* show that).

 

[Ralston18]

Anything you do may make things worse.

However, even if slow and worth the risk you have some options:

1) Copy/backup any desired data from the 2TB hard drive.

2) Try other power and data cables.

3) Run the necessary HDD diagnostics via Toshiba or the actual drive manufacturer if the latter is identifiable.

4) Maybe placing the hard drive in another case or computer may restore peformance to some level or another.

Overall, doubt that the drive is worth the repair costs which will probably come with little or no real warranty.

All other things being equal it is not a fair comparison to match SSD performance to HDD performance.