Help Diagnose Slow Disc Access

[Roberto Ragusa]

Kam Leo wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Mike McCarty
> <Mike.McCarty at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>> Don Quixote de la Mancha wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
>> I downloaded said software, and burnt a CD-ROM. I ran the diagnostics
>> on both discs (both are WDs, but of different sizes). The smaller
>> one passed both a "quick" test, and an "extended" full surface scan
>> test, and both in about the amount of time the tool estimated. The
>> larger one (the one I'm having performance problems with) failed the
>> "quick" test, due to timeout, after several times the estimated
>> run time, but passed the "extended" full surface scan, though it took
>> significantly longer than estimated. The estimated time was just over
>> 15 hours, but the test ran 83 hours 33 minutes.
> 
> Failing the "quick" test and long completion times are sure signs that
> the drive is in trouble. You can try reformatting the drive to see if
> that improves performance (doubtful). Good luck finding a new IDE
> drive. You might have to use a SATA drive with a SATA-IDE adapter or
> buy a SATA controller and change all your hard drives to SATA.

The disk has problems.
Maybe the slow speed is caused by retries, recalibrations and
other internal attempts to go ahead.
It could even be that the drive firmware is willingly degrading
the speed to send you a message. There are cars that refuse (by
software) to go beyond a defined speed when they see something
wrong with one of their components; so you go to the mechanic
and say "it is slow", he reads the diagnostics and finds that
the software says that a sensor has to be replaced. :-)

In any case, do not trust that disk anymore.

-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it