My laptop's hard drive has a minimum speed of 2.6 mb/s according to hd tune pro. Is it broken or will it fail soon?

[Phille Nitsuga]

According to HD tune pro it also has a warning on "Calibration Retry Count."

I was wondering if this could possibly the reason why whenever I play games on this laptop, I have a laggy performance that isn't internet or power related.

I have a Lenovo Y500 with intel Core i5, SLI GeForce GT 650M, 6 GB RAM.

 

[Dragos Manea]

try to diagnostic your hdd using hd sentinel, and if it has bad sectors or reallocated sectors then yes it is a faulty hdd.

 

[beegmouse]

If it's a traditional hard drive, a low speed like that could be down to file fragmentation.

Is the disc full? If it's a standard laptop drive, max speed will be about 60meg. But heavy fragmentation could easily cripple it.

As would a virus scan or any other accessing the drive during the benchmark.

Either way, free up space and back it up. And if it does fail, be glad you had the warning.

 

[Phille Nitsuga]

Fragmentation is only 5%. I tried doing HD sentinel but it didn't give me any errors, but then again I can't do much with the trial version anyways.

I am most concerned about the peak and troughs in my read benchmark test. Maximum is 112 mb/s while minimum is 2.6mb/s which is a huge drop. The average speed is 68 mb/s. I've read somewhere that the minimum shouldn't be less than 25% of average speed.

What do you guys think? Do you think that the "Calibration Retry Count" warning has something to do with it? I am all but unfamiliar with the terminologies regarding hard drives and I wish you guys can give me sound advice. Thank you for your help!

 

[beegmouse]

Maximum actual speed of a laptop HDD is usually around 60meg.

Anything above that is down to the cache or buffer. Anything below that will be zero buffer while the disk seeks.

If your average speed is 70meg you don't have a problem.

Is your disk full? 5% fragmentation is actually high. For ever 100 sectors 5 of them it has to seek on a different part of the disk.
1 Meg is typically 4096 Sectors in NTFS which works out at 204.8 Fragments in 1 Meg
Unfragmented at 70Meg/s it would take 1/70th of a second or 0.0142 seconds
If you add 204.8 seeks at roughly 12ms You add 2.4seconds
0.0142 vs 2.4142
Divide those by 1 to see how many Meg/s you could be getting
70 vs 0.414

Clear some space and defragment your HDD and it should improve.