Slow hard drive cause?

[Galdorf]

I have a hard drive from a customer it works fine but it SUPER slow, took it out put it on my test rig tried a surface test after 16 hours it still not even at 50% for a 640gb Hitachi 7200 rpm.
Shows no bad sectors just extremely slow.

 

[lcoughey]

What kind of read timeouts are you getting with your test? Could be weak heads or firmware issues. No point in wasting too much time on it, I'd just replace the drive and move on.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yeah....drives are so cheap now, waste of time to troubleshoot for hours. Just clone it to a good drive, swap out, client enjoys regained speeds and in theory a longer life of the computer.

 

[lcoughey]

Yeah....drives are so cheap now, waste of time to troubleshoot for hours. Just clone it to a good drive, swap out, client enjoys regained speeds and in theory a longer life of the computer.

I assumed that the data wasn't of value. At least I hope not. It wouldn't make sense to kill the drive during a test reading the sectors without having copied a single sector off.

Reminds me of a project where a tech plugged in a client's failing drive, started to copy files off directly, got a lot of read errors, stopped, ran a full drive fitness test to confirm that the drive was failing, repowered the drive and it no longer detected. By the time we got it, there were rings etched into the platter surfaces and the data was not recoverable. Sadly, the tech didn't take ownership of the data loss and blamed the client for not having a backup.

I'm glad that most techs here now know to image the drive first. If you can't get an image without opposition, stop and refer/outsource to a data recovery pro with the right equipment to get the best recovery result for your client.

 

[Galdorf]

There was nothing of value on hard drive guy just uses it to surf the web nothing but windows and AV installed.
I did send a hard drive to your shop fast service the customer was happy they just needed quick book files.
Anything critical like bookkeeper or accountant i always send out to a data recovery business, i don't even look at it that way i don't have to spend thousands on equipment.
I spend all day cleaning machines of malware and viruses just don't have time for starting data recovery services.

 

[lcoughey]

I figured as much.

 

[NviGate Systems]

HDD Scan can tell you the number of sectors that fall in various ranges ie; is longer than 600ms. I've seen drives that seem healthy (WD Green 1TB) that struggled to do more than 30MB per sec.

It happens.

 

[Easy PC]

I would just swap the drive out for an SSD as they are cheap now, and the customer will see an improvement in performance. The days are gone when I used to spend ages trying to figure out things like this - swap it out, customer will be happy with the improvement.