seagate hard drive failure?

Hi. As of two days ago, my computer all of a sudden experienced a huge
slowdown, in basically everything I do. I have wracked my brains
trying to figure out what could have caused this. I know windows tends
to slow down in the long run, but this was a very sudden decrease.

My first instinct was spyware, but I ran a bunch of spyware tests and
checked the running processes.

My second guess was memory, but I checked my memory, yup still good.

Maybe its a mechanical hard drive failure? Everything works, but my
system drive seems suspiciously slow. I have a Seagate 300gb
ST3300631A drive. I ran a drive speed test program, and found that the
drive averages 6000kb/sec write and 3500kb/sec read. Are these speeds
abnormally slow? they sound slow to me. If so, does anyone know what I
could try next?

Thanks!

laniik wrote:
> Hi. As of two days ago, my computer all of a sudden experienced a huge
> slowdown, in basically everything I do. I have wracked my brains
> trying to figure out what could have caused this. I know windows tends
> to slow down in the long run, but this was a very sudden decrease.
>
> My first instinct was spyware, but I ran a bunch of spyware tests and
> checked the running processes.
>
> My second guess was memory, but I checked my memory, yup still good.
>
> Maybe its a mechanical hard drive failure? Everything works, but my
> system drive seems suspiciously slow. I have a Seagate 300gb
> ST3300631A drive. I ran a drive speed test program, and found that the
> drive averages 6000kb/sec write and 3500kb/sec read. Are these speeds
> abnormally slow? they sound slow to me. If so, does anyone know what I
> could try next?
>
> Thanks!
>


If you think it might be the hard drive failing then download and run
Seagate's drive testing program. It is free and it is quick.

--
John McGaw
[Knoxville, TN, USA]
http://johnmcgaw.com

> If you think it might be the hard drive failing then download and run
> Seagate's drive testing program. It is free and it is quick.
>

I ran the drive checks and there are no errors that show up, but if
anything it would just be a slowness problem (maybe a lot of read
errors? slow spin speed?) not bad sectors or anything that would show
up on a drive test.


> - Run "Task Manager" and check to see what's running and which is eating up
> the CPU and go from there.

i looked at all running processes and everything seems fine. whats more
is that my cpu load doesnt seem to be that high. thats why i assumed it
was some kind of hardware i/o problem (maybe drive related).

thanks

oliver

laniik <laniik@yahoo.com> wrote:

> As of two days ago, my computer all of a sudden experienced
> a huge slowdown, in basically everything I do. I have wracked
> my brains trying to figure out what could have caused this.
> I know windows tends to slow down in the long run,

XP doesnt.

> but this was a very sudden decrease.

> My first instinct was spyware, but I ran a bunch of
> spyware tests and checked the running processes.

> My second guess was memory, but I checked my memory, yup still good.

> Maybe its a mechanical hard drive failure?

Yes, you can get that effect if its retrying on bad sectors and succeeding eventually.
That doesnt appear to be your problem tho since the Seagate diags dont see any problem.

> Everything works, but my system drive seems suspiciously slow. I have
> a Seagate 300gb ST3300631A drive. I ran a drive speed test program,
< and found that the drive averages 6000kb/sec write and 3500kb/sec read.
> Are these speeds abnormally slow? they sound slow to me.

Yes.

> If so, does anyone know what I could try next?

Check if DMA is being used for that drive. Win will turn DMA off when it
sees a number of errors in comms to the drive, for the safety of your data.
Thats usually due to a bad cable and is the first thing to try if DMA is off.
You will need to manually turn DMA on again if that is the problem.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472/

If DMA is on, see what the speed of the cpu is being reported as.
You can see the bios have a massive brain fart and run the cpu at
way below the speed its supposed to be running it at and get that
very noticeable slowdown. If that the problem, try resetting the
cmos and if that doesnt fix it, try replacing the cmos battery.

You can also see the system deliberately slowed down because
its overheating. Check the cpu temp with something like speedfan
and if thats way too high, check for fur in the cpu fan and that its
actually rotating at the correct speed etc.

laniik wrote:
> > If you think it might be the hard drive failing then download and run
> > Seagate's drive testing program. It is free and it is quick.
> >
>
> I ran the drive checks and there are no errors that show up, but if
> anything it would just be a slowness problem (maybe a lot of read
> errors? slow spin speed?) not bad sectors or anything that would show
> up on a drive test.
>
>

Try this: Win2k or XP only.

http://hddguru.com/content/en/softwa...01.22-HDDScan/

(just don't use the "erase" feature!) :)

laniik wrote:

>> If you think it might be the hard drive failing then download and run
>> Seagate's drive testing program. It is free and it is quick.
>>
>
>I ran the drive checks and there are no errors that show up, but if
>anything it would just be a slowness problem (maybe a lot of read
>errors? slow spin speed?) not bad sectors or anything that would show
>up on a drive test.

I had the same problem with a Seagate SATA 150, ran the diagnostic test
and was advised that the errors were acceptable but the drive was
taking 30 minutes to unrar a DVD, when it usually takes two minutes.
Didn't contact Seagate for an RMA because the drive was purchased from
a shop that went out of business.

The weird part about this incident is that O&O Defrag and Window's was
not able to defrag the partitions. This happened a couple months ago
and I can't remember the exact error message.
>
>
>> - Run "Task Manager" and check to see what's running and which is eating up
>> the CPU and go from there.
>
>i looked at all running processes and everything seems fine. whats more
>is that my cpu load doesnt seem to be that high. thats why i assumed it
>was some kind of hardware i/o problem (maybe drive related).
>
>thanks
>
>oliver

> I had the same problem with a Seagate SATA 150, ran the diagnostic test
> and was advised that the errors were acceptable but the drive was
> taking 30 minutes to unrar a DVD, when it usually takes two minutes.
> Didn't contact Seagate for an RMA because the drive was purchased from
> a shop that went out of business.
>
> The weird part about this incident is that O&O Defrag and Window's was
> not able to defrag the partitions. This happened a couple months ago
> and I can't remember the exact error message.


Hm interesting. actually, I found the error, and its tremendously
anticlimactic. In trying to remember what had changed on my system
since the slowdown, I found out that the problem actually came from an
installation of winamp 5.32. For some my computer had a huge allergic
reaction to the new winamp, even when *not* currently running. Even
with the winamp monitor (startup thing) off it was still slow.

I cant explain it, but after removing the program entirely and
downgrading to 2.9, my computer is running smooth again.

thanks for the help!

oliver

On 18 Dec 2006 18:34:03 -0800, "laniik" <laniik@yahoo.com> wrote:

>> I had the same problem with a Seagate SATA 150, ran the diagnostic test
>> and was advised that the errors were acceptable but the drive was
>> taking 30 minutes to unrar a DVD, when it usually takes two minutes.
>> Didn't contact Seagate for an RMA because the drive was purchased from
>> a shop that went out of business.
>>
>> The weird part about this incident is that O&O Defrag and Window's was
>> not able to defrag the partitions. This happened a couple months ago
>> and I can't remember the exact error message.
>
>
>Hm interesting. actually, I found the error, and its tremendously
>anticlimactic. In trying to remember what had changed on my system
>since the slowdown, I found out that the problem actually came from an
>installation of winamp 5.32. For some my computer had a huge allergic
>reaction to the new winamp, even when *not* currently running. Even
>with the winamp monitor (startup thing) off it was still slow.
>
>I cant explain it, but after removing the program entirely and
>downgrading to 2.9, my computer is running smooth again.
>
>thanks for the help!
>
>oliver

Thanks for posting the solution. Lots of times no one ever hears the
outcome. I was going to suggest you take a look at your device
manager and DMA settings. I had a similar slowdown because my
computer/disk drives didn't get along well and I would configure to
Ultra DMA but after a few days it would cough and switch to PIO. I
changed cables and it finally stopped doing it.