Hey guys. I have this 1TB Seagate on my PC for almost 4 years now. about 3 months ago, it started to act weird. it started to be on 75,80,90,100% usage most of the time, and even though I tried hundreds of solution like checking for viruses, changing windows, turning off windows features etc it didn't help at all. it's always like this: when PC is fully turned off and I turn it on, I always have to wait for around 2-3 minutes on login screen and then login, otherwise everything runs like crap. then after working for like 1-2 hours (and if I do things like heavy unraring, gaming, etc even sooner) usually hard usages goes up for every simple work I'm doing, everything gets slow and laggy, and pc runs like crap. the red hdd light on the case stays always on, and a very very low "tap-tap-tap-tap-tap " sound can be heard from the hard when it's write/reading something. then I have to restart , and even though this time everything slightly runs better and faster but soon or late, maybe after 4-5 hours or after a heavy activity like copy/pasting or unraring, or playing games, the same crap happens again. what's so funny is that I'v tried lots of hdd test softwares and all them say everything's fine and everything is 'green' in the test results. but it's definitely not. sooo... what do you think guys? is it slowly dying? should I buy a new one? rx480 oc 8gb ram b85-plus I7 4790K
Backup anything on the HDD that is important, drives can fail in strange ways, sometimes no symptoms at all then fail, sometimes long winded slow deaths like this one If you have space, back it up, delete partitions on it, create new primary partition and format, then copy stuff back, see if it still does it
How long has it been since you formatted it? I had a HDD doing that last year, was super slow as well, then I formatted it, was 60% fragmented, which is the highest I have ever seen, it has been fine ever since. lol
^ I've never formatted it completely. just formatted the drives for installing windows, but I've defraged it a lot of times since 3 months ago. by windows tool, and other softwares like defraggler which took a lot of time. but as I said it did not help.
It definitely sounds like a dying HDD. The ticks and the massive usage-%'s (meaning your experience will be very poor with a choppy OS, long loading times etc.) points to the built-in firmware on the HDD trying to re-read/remap sectors that have become corrupt due to wear and tear or similar. Buy a new HDD, back up your current HDD and never trust it again. You'll save tears and ripping out your hair after losing everything in case it simply won't work next time you power up your PC. HDD's are pretty cheap (I'd recommend a modern SSD as system drive and a HDD/Hybrid for storage/etc.)
Check disk via https://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html if any value have warning
I agree, back up your drive. Desktop drives are rated for light use only, rated at 2400 hours a year (100 days at 24/7). The warranty is two years, so it's really only warranted for 200 days of full use, and 55 TB of combined read/writes per year. This is for the latest Barracuda drives, specs read from the ST4000DM004 column of the datasheet, but the older versions are much the same. Note that the branding of the drives have changed, the typical line are now called 'compute'. I'm surprised it says sustained speed of 190 MB/s. https://www.seagate.com/www-content...cuda-new/files/barracuda-ds-1900-5-1702us.pdf Surveillance drives are cost competitive and are designed for constant 24/7 use (8760 on hours per year), 3 year warranty, 1,000,000 hour MTBF, 190 MB/s sustained speeds. Model ST4000VX007 (4 GB, as above). It's also rated to 70 degrees celsius during operation, the normal drives are rated at 60 C. The NAS version home version ST4000VN008 has similar specs to the surveillance. The desktop drives are basically rubbish drives, the extra cost of the surveillance, NAS, or other enterprise rated drive if you get a bargain is well worth it. Western Digital and Toshiba are much the same, avoid the desktop drives and go for the heavy workload rated drives.
Using a SSD for anything non-gaming or OS is wasteful. A 1 TB SSD is also expensive, it would be better to get a 240/256 GB SSD, and a decent HDD as I mentioned above for everything else, including games where the advantage of running off a SSD is minimal.
