Weird HDD problem

[JorgeA]

Calling on MSFN's hardware cognoscenti:

About two weeks ago I noticed that the HDD on my Vista system seemed to be running very slowly. Despite the drive's passing tests from several popular maintenance/health applications, I was worried that it might fail suddenly at any moment. It was taking forever to yield search results in Outlook, and Windows Explorer searches were running like molasses. Who knows, it's a seven-year-old, heavily used disk.

So, taking no chances, a week ago I imaged the drive (a Seagate ST3500620AS) and bought the closest model to it that I could find (a Seagate ST500DM002) in the hope that doing it this way would minimize problems with running the system on the new drive after transferring it.

After I got everything set up (Vista even found drivers for the new HDD), Outlook and Explorer searches are indeed running much faster. But I find that launching programs (such as Pale Moon) is quite sluggish. So I ran the program HD Tune and was shocked to see the following performance graph:

 

It's hard to miss the sudden and precipitous drop in performance about two-thirds of the way into the test.

What could be causing this? It's a brand-new, store-bought drive. The previous HDD (sorry, I didn't keep screenshots of it) showed a curve that started much lower but then gently dropped to about the 15 mark (left-hand scale) at the 100% point on the chart shown in the screenshot. The dot scatter pattern was also much tighter, roughly mirroring the blue graph line (that is, going up as the access time in milliseconds increased).

One other thing that might possibly have a bearing on the issue: free space in this 500GB drive was about 234GB when the system was first installed on it. After the index was rebuilt, free space went down to about 225GB. But every day since, I've noticed that the amount of free space keeps dropping for no apparent reason. Yesterday it was down to 190GB; I just checked now, and it's currently at 180GB. The list of files on the drive, sorted by size by Defraggler, shows six very large files (with names formed by long strings of letters and numbers inside curly brackets) in the folder C:\System Volume Information, ranging in size from some 5GB to 8GB.

What the heck is going on? Scans with various AV tools reveal no infection.

I look forward to hearing your wise counsel. 

--JorgeA

 

[jaclaz]

Those strange name folder are connected with shadow copies and/or restore points.

The amount (and size) of the files may depend on specifc machine settings/preferences, though there are reports that sometimes the thingy doesn't work properly and needs to be re-initialized.

Like:

hxxp://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-performance/how-do-i-delete-huge-files-from-system-volume/2d31b256-2cb6-486e-af97-e6018f594581?page=1

If I were you I would try a hard disk benchmark run from a LiveCD or however minimal PE (or Linux) or with the disk connected to another computer, in order to separate hardware issues (if any) from software/driver/whatever ones.

jaclaz

[JorgeA]

Thanks, jaclaz. I'll try one of those options the first chance I get.

--JorgeA

[submix8c]

Where's "help"?

When I made posts in this topic -

I was able to get a (sort of) "more options" screen (like before) to (kind of) format. but then I realized a couple needed edit. From that, there was no "more options" and couldn't seem to find any other formatting options except the ones on the "bar". I really would like to "fix" it so it looks "purtier" and with the same fonts throughout.

Also, still nothing but a pretty blue "bar" above the posts (I had provided a screenshot already).

Also, this computer (or any of my others) aren't Surfaces with Win8/WinX on them. Nor is it an Android or iPhone that I can swipe or TXT with.

[JorgeA]

All right, I had a chance to investigate this issue.

As I could not find any Linux tools that provided a visual representation of the HDD's performance as in the screenshot above, the next-best thing was to try booting Windows into Safe Mode. I ran the HD Tune test several times. Here's a sample screenshot:

Then I rebooted Windows in normal mode and waited until the system settled down. The results were, uhh, different -- and inconsistent. Here they are in sequential order:

What do you think?

--JorgeA

[jaclaz]

The first screenshot (in safe mode) is "normal".

The third screenshot is terrible.

I would say that in your "full mode" you have a conflict of some kind (a driver or a background running task)

How to find what it is may be a difficult question, check the driver, maybe you want to try re-installing the driver or check for an update version of it, but since it wrked before it is unlikely that a new version is needed, only maybe the current drive had some form of corruption.

You could also try again on the "full" system after having reduced running services to a minimum and/or re-running the test with an eye on Task Manager resource usage and adding the columns "write" and "read" bytes (or whatever they are called).

jaclaz 
 

[JorgeA]

Thanks, jaclaz.

I tried updating the HDD driver via Device Manager, but Windows reports that it already has the most up-to-date driver. A visit to the Seagate website didn't reveal any new firmware, either.

I also added the I/O Read Bytes and I/O Write Bytes columns to Task Manager and ran the HD Tune test, but I'm not sure what I should be looking for while the test is running. Maybe a big jump in a certain process?

Anyway, next chance that I get I'll try ending some processes (one at a time) and run HD Tune after each kill, to see if there's a difference.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Update: I've been running Resource Monitor at the same time as HD Tune, keeping an eye on the processes listed in the Disk section relative to how the HD Tune graph does. So far, there seems to be some correlation between the transfer rate (blue graph in the screenshots above) and the I/O activity of certain processes. This doesn't always happen, but frequently the transfer rate plummets to near zero when either Outlook, or the Search Indexer, or Norton-related Live Update log files show elevated read/write values. Hopefully this will yield some clues. --JorgeA  

Edited March 23, 2016 by JorgeA

[jaclaz]

The Outlook I personally don't use since (say) 2001, the Search Indexer that anyone would normally disable and the Norton that shouldn't (IMNSHO) even come near a running system?

All in all I would de-classify the issue from "surprising" to "normal" .

I mean, if you are running a few resource hogs in background, it is not so improbable that one (or more than one) of them actually brings your system down to a crawl ...

The issue may be now finding out if that amount of overhead in the I/O is the "normal" amount such tools are expected to create or if one of them is acting "queerly".

jaclaz
 

[JorgeA]

12 hours ago, jaclaz said:

The Outlook I personally don't use since (say) 2001, the Search Indexer that anyone would normally disable and the Norton that shouldn't (IMNSHO) even come near a running system?

All in all I would de-classify the issue from "surprising" to "normal" .

I mean, if you are running a few resource hogs in background, it is not so improbable that one (or more than one) of them actually brings your system down to a crawl ...

The issue may be now finding out if that amount of overhead in the I/O is the "normal" amount such tools are expected to create or if one of them is acting "queerly".

jaclaz
 

FWIW, the previous hard drive (which had the same set of processes running) had always shown a normal curve. When it got sluggish, leading me to replace it, it was because the drive was going bad. Test results from one suite came back with every category showing the old disk to be either in "old age" or in a "pre-failure" state.

For whatever reason, the new HDD is having the reported issues while the old one didn't.

Now let me add another spice into the mix. Mysteriously, this morning the free space climbed back UP to the range where it should be, at 241GB. And the HD Tune graphs are looking more normal, although still not entirely so -- the steep drops are fewer, although still there are some.

--JorgeA

Edited March 24, 2016 by JorgeA
separate paragraphs (hopefully)

[jaclaz]

11 hours ago, JorgeA said:

FWIW, the previous hard drive (which had the same set of processes running) had always shown a normal curve. When it got sluggish, leading me to replace it, it was because the drive was going bad. Test results from one suite came back with every category showing the old disk to be either in "old age" or in a "pre-failure" state.

Allow me to disagree. 
There is NO actual "suite" capable of predicting *anything* on a hard disk status of health.
The data coming from S.M.A.R.T. (the thing I personally call D.U.M.B.) are nothing but a set of mostly meaningless metrics, which may (or may not) be a rough indicator of the "past" of the disk drive that bears little or no connection to its future.

Flippism has roughly the same reliability (JFYI):

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate-720011-hdds/?page=187#comment-1073898

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/170237-which-drive-sould-i-get/It is entirely possible that the "old" hard disk (though it being actually old and though the decision to replace it with a new one remains anyway a good decision) had no real issues (yet) and the sluggishness originally came from some OS conflict with one or more of those background accesses to it, and this obviously has not been fixed with the mere replacement of the disk.

jaclaz
 

[JorgeA]

That was informative. The key post (IMO) is this one.

FWIW, the new hard drive seems to be getting more consistently "normal" HD Tune graph lines, ever since the mysteriously lost ~50GB of HDD space managed to reappear just as mysteriously. There are still hiccups, but more and more they're looking like this, without the prolonged nadirs:

Needless to say, I'll keep monitoring the performance.

--JorgeA