Western Digital performance problem

[MrB]

Hi guys,

i am experiencing this problem. Everething worked fine on my system until few days ago. Very routine action like click on an icon at the desktop takes like 10 mins. During this time i can hear HDD "working" and its temperature growing. I can work with app which is actually opened, for example i can use Firefox, but i can even run task manager to kill the process. CPU load is like 15%, memory above the sime, so pretty normal. It looks like only HDD is working. After those 10mins i can work but after 20-30mins it is back. I did plenty of tests, SMART diagnositcs etc. and they all show HDD is good. Than i tried HDDscan and you can see on graphs that there are significant drops of reading times. I reinstalled the whole system, update all the drivers i could and nothing helped. Do you think that HDD might be the reason for this trouble? Should i try some kind of low level format? Thx for any kind of help!

http://dionys.own.cz/HDD/HDD.jpg
http://dionys.own.cz/HDD/HDD2.jpg
http://dionys.own.cz/HDD/HDD3.jpg

OS : Win XP SP2
MB : DFI LanParty nForce4 Ultra-D
CPU: Opteron 144
RAM : 1GB DDR A-data 433MHz

[Dataq]

Hi MrB,
If you can live without the data then it is definitely worth a low level format. If you can buy/borrow another drive and see if you can install to that.

Some drive problems do start with very slow access even though the SMART status is fine. Also remember to stay backed up!