Sudden drop in hard drive performance

[agentbilly]

My laptop has seemed noticeably slower the last few days. Startup is slower and programs load slower than they used to. But, once I'm in a program performance is smooth. The startup before I noticed the problem, windows gave me a blue screen (not a BSOD) that said please wait or something like that. The next time I booted, Windows ran a Chkdsk, but found no problems.

Here's my rig:
Acer Aspire 5672WLMI
Intel Core Duo T2300 @ 1.66ghz
ATI Mobility Radeon X1600
2gb DDR2-667 (upgraded this myself)
Toshiba MK1234GSX 120gb HDD (review)
Windows XP Home with SP2

I downloaded HD Tune 2.53 to run a benchmark, and the test failed at 35%, giving me a read error. But the max transfer rate I got in that first 35% was only 1.8mb/s. I also ran HD Tach, and this confirmed my result. HD Tach gave 1.8 mb/s sequential read throuhgout the whole test. HD Tach also gave me 2 mb/s burst speed, and 50% CPU usage.

I ran a virus scan to rule out that possibility, and the scan took 145 minutes, usually it only takes 55 minutes. AVG Free 7.5 found no viruses, and a-squared Free 3.1 found no malware.

Is there anything I can do on the software side to fix the problem, or do I need a new HDD?

 

[Sink41]

Might be that your hard drive is in pio mode.

Has an automated script thing but its really not that hard to do yourself
http://winhlp.com/node/10

Microsoft article on it.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472

 

[agentbilly]

Nice suggestion, but it's a SATA drive.

 

[Narse]

The fact you got a read error tells me that you most likely have a faulty drive.

 

[agentbilly]

My ignorance is showing, the fact that it's a sata drive doesn't matter.
The computer is still usable and I've had it for two years with no problems. Why would the drive go bad now?
I'll look into the pio mode thing, and get back to you.

 

[agentbilly]

I checked event viewer, and there are a ton of disk errors. The 3 I encountered are:
The device, \Device\Harddisk0\D, has a bad block.
The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort0, did not respond within the timeout period.
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation.

The first of these errors is from two days ago when the problem started appearing.
Is it okay to keep using this drive if I keep a backup of important data?

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Backup and replace the drive, its on its way out.

 

[agentbilly]

So I checked device manager and the drive was in PIO mode, I used the manual method desribed in Sink41's link and that fixed the problem.
But, I did get some weird results in my benchmark.
Here's the screenshot.
http://img146.imageshack.us/my...e=hdtachresultsyj3.gif

 

[Old Hippie]

So I checked device manager and the drive was in PIO mode, I used the manual method desribed in Sink41's link and that fixed the problem.

More than likely, it's just gonna happen again because your drive is failing.

Good Luck!

 

[daveybrat]

The reason your hard drive was in PIO mode is directly related to the errors in your event log. When windows takes too long trying to access a bad area of your hard drive, it drops it down from DMA to PIO mode. The fix you did will last for a little while but will happen again until the hard drives bad sectors are either repaired or you clone the hard drive to a new one.

The only problem with your setup is that there currently is no manufacturer's diagnostic test for Toshiba brand hard drives. You can test your hard drive with IBM's fitness test or seagate's utility to determine if it's bad, but you will not get the option to repair the bad sectors.