Overall Issue with my Hard Drive?

camjac251

Honorable
Nov 17, 2013
20
0
10,510
I have been noticing this for a long time now but it feels like my hard drives and SSDs alike are not really performing well. I have a Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD, Samsung 840 120GB SSD, and a Western Digital 4TB Black Drive. Motherboard is the Asrock Z87 Extreme 6 with updated firmware and drivers, i7 4770k, and GTX 770.

When editing with bluray mp4 files that are 30GB in Premiere Pro, playback lags greatly. It'll show 30fps then drop down to 5fps within the matter of seconds. I'm currently copying something right now from my Black drive to itself and its barely reaching 30MBps. I was playing Grand Theft Auto IV yesterday in 4k downscaled to 1080p. Using my recording program (Action, running on AVI original), it was running the game from the same drive as the recording. When not recording I was recording, when recording, I was getting 30fps. And every now and then the textures would pop. I then moved the game to my 256GB (os install) SSD and tried it there, I added some textures to the game to make it nicer looking and my fps drops really bad when recording. I was recording with Nvidia NVENC, which uses the onboard h264 encoder in the card to encode a small filesize, and it was degrading my game. That time too, I was playing 1080p.

I am not sure what is at fault. Or if anything at all, if this is just usual expected performance. Could it be my motherboard? Could it be faulty? To add to that though, a few times, not frequently, pretty random and rare but still occurs, when I turn on my system, it boots, then I see the mouse cursor in the middle with a black screen, can't move the cursor, nothing loads up, just black and the cursor, and I end up rebooting to fix. Then pretty recently when I booted up my system, it took a long while to load everything up, ended up rebooting to fix.
 
Hey there, camjac251!

I'm so sorry to hear about your WD Black issues. The drive is performing really bad according to your description. 🙁
I'd suggest to backup the data from it somewhere else before proceeding with the troubleshooting.
Then test the drive using WD Data LifeGuard diagnostics to check up on the health and S.M.A.R.T. status, make sure you pass the quick and extended test. Here's a link to the utility: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=y0Z5x9

To rule out the possibility of the motherboard causing this, you can try plugging the HDD in another computer and see how it will perform there. Unfortunately, if the issue persist, you might need to RMA the drive.

Keep me posted with the results of the test!
SuperSoph_WD