I would like to know what you all suggest for figuring out hard drive health/performance. I have bought multiple drives over the past 5 years and would like to know their health and how well they are performing(compared to a new drive). I am trying to figure out the general health/performance of the drives and also a bottle neck in my machine. I feel like these two things are related. For example when I am updating a game, my machine gets very slow and laggy(mouse teleports). I have fios 100mbps down/100mbps up, hdd is 3tb(245gb free) 7200rpm 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s. Any suggestions on how I go about this process? linux or windows free software would be great. Any help is greatly appreciated!
windows 10 pro is installed on ssd
pc specs:
Case: Cooler Master Storm Stryker CPU: Intel i7-4770k (Stock) CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo GPU: Asus Strix 980ti DC3OC 6gb (Stock) RAM: Corsair Vengeance 32 GB DDR3 2133 Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD5H Power Supply: Corsair 750W HX 80+ Gold Modular Storage: Seagate 3TB & Samsung EVO 128GB SSD 840 PRO Optical Drive: LG WH16NS40, LITE-ON ihas524-T06 OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit
I’ve used Spinrite from Gibson Research Corporation before and it’s worked pretty well. It scans the disk sectors from start to end, reads/inverts/writes to manually refresh the S.M.A.R.T. and raw data on the disk. Give it a try.
Another +1 for spinrite. Well worth its cost but if you cant afford it HD tune (non pro) can at least do a sector by sector scan if you believe you have a failing drive as well as a general benchmark.
@MazeFrame’s suggestion is really handy for looking at smart data and general disk information. You should, in theory, be able to see bad sectors coming with it.
crystaldiskmark can also be useful for benchmarking throughput of a drive but I’ve found that if a drive is becoming sluggish its usually because of a high load and not a problem with the disk itself. Windows has built in monitoring tools with perfmon if you’re trying to find an issue.
Of course there is ddrescue. Its a little less intuitive but can be set up to retry bad sectors which can sometimes result in a save if you only have a few bad sectors. Sometimes though its best to not try and reread bad sectors because it takes a long time and can make things worse.
If your computers IO is lagging while transferring data it might be related to the way windows 10 caches data with unused ram. I have a theory. When I load games for the first time in a while, it sometimes stutters loading everything into ram, but then the next time it loads its quick with no stutter. I have a samsung 960 evo and even with that it will do it. I could be wrong about this one. Just a theory.
thank you for all of that information. i will check hd tune and crystaldiskmark out as well as the others. My computer gets sluggish only when its heavy internet usage and during game updates. i am wondering if i should throw a 1tb 860 evo ssd in to see if it helps at all.
ya well like i mentioned in original post its chugs when doing game updates and sometimes heavy internet usage. ssd has windows on it and the 3tb is all data. i feel like my computer should still be fairly fast given the specs even though its 5 years old
with windows that depends on how much the drive is fragmented.
and how often you run defrag. (hdd’s)
do not defrag ssd’s they should never need that program run on them.
your drive will not affect the internet speed as much as the accumulation of temporary internet files and cache files
aside form privacy concerns cleaning out the cookies and the cache files dramatically speeds up the way your system processes information during web surfing.
a cluttered ti file consumes processor time as the cpu is looking for the proper cookie file first before loading the site.
if the cookie file is cleared out frequently the cpu is not wasting cycles looking through it.
example you type in a url
step one the cpu checks the first cookie and compares it to the url signature.
(Thats 2 cycles there) then it checks the next cookie in the file and compares it
(thats (4 cycles total there)
and so on, If you have 2000 cookies to look through thats 4000 cycles and often more.
with drive speed(hdd) a fragmented drive leads to slowed response running installed programs an a lot of drive activity.
many people often confuse the two (but not because they are stupid)
its because of the lapse in training.
I have not run defrag ever. @Gnuuser should i start running it now? how often should i run defrag? I run ccleaner pretty often and use the browser clear history and all that often as well.
do not run it on the drive with the partition issues until you’ve tried all the recovery options
but when all is done (if you haven’t run it before its going to take a long time for initial run.
with a 2 tb drive you may be looking at approximately 1 to 2 days to complete.
but that also depends on how much system ram you have installed
after the initial run its a lot faster.
on the windows machine i still have I run defrag every week without fail (even if windows says it does not need it)
and the drives run as fast as they were new.
servers benefit from this practice tremendously (those still running windows) and are usually set up to run automatically during the wee hours of the night
