Hard Drive Speed Drops

[Collider]

I decided to run HD Tune to benchmark one of my drives and it shows some sudden drops during the benchmark where it will drop from ~100MB/s to ~20MB/s.

Here's a picture of the graph:


Other than this the drive works fine and SMART test / Health tab reports no errors. Also tried swapping a SATA cable, same results.

Is this normal for a drive or should I be concerned ?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I would be curious, what that graph looks like, if you run it in Safe Mode. The graph has severe dips, which could be diagnostic towards HDD troubles, but the symmetry of the graph, suggests perhaps repeated background HDD access by Windows. It's just too similar, the way the dips are.

 

[Collider]

Thanks for pointing that out. In safe mode HDD benched normally.

 

[VirtualLarry]

That second graph looks good.