Odd Hard Drive Behavior

[ronbo613]

I have an HGST 4TB Coolspin hard drive that has been acting oddly. When I transfer large files, or a large quantity of files, the transfer rates are very high when the transfer is beginning, but after about ten minutes, the transfer rate gets slower and slower, hits about 4 Mb/s and the computer usually freezes.

Crystal Disc Info shows no abnormalities and the health status is "Good". The drive is maybe two years old and is used for storage, so it's not a daily use drive. I changed the SATA cable but it's still the same.

Not sure what's going on here. Everything looks good, but something is not right. I'm hesitant to send it back to HGST since all the test data shows no problems.

Any ideas?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Monitor temps during the file transfer, of both source and dest. drives?
(HWMonitor?)

 

[ronbo613]

Monitor temps during the file transfer, of both source and dest. drives?
(HWMonitor?)

I used HW Monitor to check out the temps of the drives, never goes over 34°C. I have a number of hard drives in my case so it has a few extra fans.

I checked the error log, there weren't many errors, but I did notice a "gpt_loader" error. gpt_loader.sys appears to be a driver bundled with the HGST GPT Disk Manager, which I used to partition this drive and two other 4TB HGST hard drives, neither of which have any problems. If the gpt_loader driver is corrupt, why would it affect one HGST drive but not the other two?

There is some info on the gpt_loader issues HERE and HERE.

Normally, I would have partitioned these hard drives with Windows, but if I recall correctly, I had some difficulty getting the full drive capacity doing that so I used the HGST GPT Disk Manager.

 

[Elixer]

Which error log are you checking? The event viewer?
When your situation happens, usually, it is a sign the HD is going bad, having trouble reading or writing sectors, unless you have some extreme file fragmentation going on.

 

[ronbo613]

Which error log are you checking? The event viewer?
When your situation happens, usually, it is a sign the HD is going bad, having trouble reading or writing sectors, unless you have some extreme file fragmentation going on.

Yes, the event viewer.

My first impression, like yours, is that the drive is failing. However, with no test data to back it up, I don't see how HGST is going to RMA it. The drive works fine until you transfer large amounts of data. I think I looked at the fragmentation status before, but I'll check again.

The drive has been acting like this for a few months and I made sure everything was backed up because I was sure it would die, but it hasn't.

 

[Elixer]

Can you run HD Tune, and show us the graph it makes?

 

[Ketchup]

What does chkdsk say?

 

[ronbo613]

Can you run HD Tune, and show us the graph it makes?

I ran HD Tune, the version I have is probably outdated. HD Tune shows incorrect drive capacity across the board. When you have a system as old as the one I've got, you don't do a lot of benchmarking because it scares you.

What does chkdsk say?

I'm sure I've run it on this drive and didn't find anything out of the ordinary. It takes a long time to run on a 4TB drive.

 

[Ketchup]

I wonder if there is some background software causing you issues, such as an AV?

What kind of transfers are you doing? From one partition to another? One drive to another? One computer to another?

 

[ronbo613]

I wonder if there is some background software causing you issues, such as an AV?

What kind of transfers are you doing? From one partition to another? One drive to another? One computer to another?

I have Eset NOD32, it doesn't seem to have much impact on any internal file transfers. No files downloaded from the internet. Video camera>hard drive>another hard drive. The file transfers are mainly video files; AVI files, which are huge, MP4 files, not quite as large, moving from one internal hard drive to another internal drive, all drives have one partition.

It's only this one drive that has a problem. I have another HGST 5700rpm drive that is the same drive, only a bit newer, with no problems at all.

The only real solution I've found so far is beer.

 

[Elixer]

Hmm, that pic looks sane.
I suppose you could disable the AV as a test and see if that helps.
Oh, and how did you format this 4TB unit? Does it have the default block size?

You can get hddscan from here http://hddscan.com/ run the read test first, it will show you something like this

Except in your case, it will have more data...it will show access times.

The next test though, I am not sure you are willing to do it.
It is the destructive test (erase mode), it will do the same type of a graph, but again, it will wipe out all your data, but, it will show you access times again.
It will take a long, long time though, a 4TB will take 7+ hours (I just throw it in a machine, and let it do it overnight so I don't have a exact time of when it will finish).

 

[Ketchup]

So what notherboard is this, Have you tried different Sata ports?

 

[ronbo613]

So what notherboard is this, Have you tried different Sata ports?

It's the computer in my signature. I have tried different motherboard ports as well as a port on a PCIe SATA expansion card.

I'll run hddscan when I get a chance. The last resort plan is to wipe the drive and start from scratch.

 

[Ketchup]

Just wanted to make sure. The reason I ask is because your board has 2 SATA ports running off a Marvell chip, and those chips are notorious for issues like this.

 

[ronbo613]

Just wanted to make sure. The reason I ask is because your board has 2 SATA ports running off a Marvell chip, and those chips are notorious for issues like this.

Yeah, I'm aware of the Marvell chip issues. I tried to run the boot SSD off it to get the falsely advertised SATA III speed and had nothing but trouble with periods of total failure. This will be my last Gigabyte motherboard for sure.

 

[ronbo613]

I ran most of an HDDScan Read test. It takes a long time to run it and I had to move on. Here is what I got:

This doesn't look all that bad to me, but none of the other tests show any problems either. The drive never went over 25°C during the six hours or so while HDDScan was running. The only thing is that HDDScan is a read test and most of my problems occur while writing to the disc.

This really is a frustrating problem.

 

[ronbo613]

I tested the hard drive in question again today and it shows the problems I'm having. Here is the HDTune test from a few days ago:

And an HDTune test from today:

HDDScan from a few days ago:

And HDDScan today:

I have noticed that the drive runs much slower on sunny days...

 

[Elixer]

That performance got really bad quickly.
When this went on, did you noticed anything pop up in the event viewer?

There is a write test on HDDScan as well, called "Erase". Yeah, it will kill all data.

 

[ronbo613]

That performance got really bad quickly.
When this went on, did you noticed anything pop up in the event viewer?

There is a write test on HDDScan as well, called "Erase". Yeah, it will kill all data.

Sometimes the drive will run OK for five minutes or so then drop to 5 MB/s, other times it's slow from start to finish. Chkdsk takes a couple days to run and doesn't find any errors. HGST's WinDFT doesn't work(apparently not compatible with Intel chipsets) and the HGST website says the serial numbers for all my HGST drives are invalid. I've about had enough. This drive is a paperweight and I don't know what's up with HGST support. I contacted HGST to see what the deal is, if they don't have some answers, no more HGST drives for me.