A lot of <150 ms sectors in WD drive.

[Enderw]

Hello to everyone.

I've recently noticed a poor performance of one of my hard drives. I started to wonder, what's going on, since it had never been used to much, and during the load never reported any errors. I run MHDD test on him and here it is what I found. Great number of green <150ms latency sectors.

I use MHDD for a quite some time, but I received such result of scan for the first time. In the past I've been mostly finding UNC sectors along with some <>500 ms ones, and some alarming history in SMART, telling me, that the drive is not reliable and it would be best to be replace him in a near future.

But this, I don't know. What is interesting, I was watching the scan, and I noticed, that MHDD reports those green sectors in some sort of areas, where other sectors with <50 ms can be found. Also in those areas drive noticeably was slowing down.

For me, personally, MHDD says, that these are last breaths of the drive, before it starts to show UNC, and it should be replaced.

But the question is, is it possible to receive such results because of old PSU, with quite reasonable voltages, but a long history of work? PSU is 620W modular type from the Cooler Master company, and it is 10 years old.

I'm not interested in reviving the drive if it is more likely the condition of it to become worse and worse. But is it possible to receive clean, good latency for those sectors after "erase of delays" option at this scale of <150ms?

I will not be able to run such option for a moment, so that's why I'm asking. If someone experience would confirm my suspicions, I think I'd prefer to avoid struggling with this drive, and get a new one.

On the photos You will find the end result of scan and SMART attributes.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Attachments

[unknown]

The drive is working normally.

[BGman]

The drive is working normally.

Agree.

[Enderw]

The drive is working normally.

I can't agree. The reason I scanned the drive was poor performance during the boot of the system (Windows 7 Home Edition), also during each load of application.

At my work, most of the workstations have the same operation system and loads it from the similar HDDs. Comparing to them, my drive performs very badly. I wound't bother anyone on this forum, if my drive would work just a little slower then those I have daily contact with.

Moreover, when I was watching the MHDD test, when it reached those "faulty areas" it definitely slowed to its 50% of average speed, counting more or less of course.

But from Your suggestions I assume, that I have nothing left to do then to try to erase the drive and see if its performance increases or just leave it, because whether I like it or not, the drive operates within acceptable limits, and even if it would still have warranty, I couldn't claim it.

Well... it seems that I will simply replace it, because I have unused Western Digital 1TB Black Series drive, which is fine and which I'm sure will outperform that poor WD Blue one.

Nevertheless, I've become intrigued with Your suggestions, I changed my mind and I believe I will work with that messy WD and try to revive it.

When I get some results I will post them.

Any other suggestions, how to work with that drive?

[maximus]

When looking at the technical results from the test and smart, it would appear that the drive is functioning normal. But even from your initial post, it should have apparent that the drive could possibly have a spot that is going bad, but is not bad enough yet to cause certain flags to be raised. This last post seems to confirm that there may be a spot on the drive that is starting to fail. Erasing (overwriting) the drive could resolve the issue, but it would be very questionable how long it would last.

I think the only way to see more of what is going on would be to run something like HD Tune on the drive to see if there is a spot that spikes in the bad spot. Maybe others can suggest a better software to do this. I have personally used ddrescue with some advanced options to produce a read speed log, but then that log needs to be processed by yet another program (gnuplot) to graph the results. I don't know what other programs can give a good detailed graph of read speed.