Anyone had a hard drive problem like this?

[hello_hello]

It's a WD 320GB drive, around 5 and a half years old. It's done a lot of work during that time, often running 24/7. I'll be throwing it away as I don't think it's worth spending any more time on it, however.....

Once files are saved to it, it reads them at normal speed. I can even boot Windows from it and everything appears to run at normal speed (I ran Windows from it originally).
Windows can full format the drive and it takes exactly the same amount of time to complete as it does for a second WD 320GB drive I have.
It (naturally) passes SMART tests with flying colours.
The WD hard drive diagnostic thingy claims it's perfectly fine. It'll write zeros to the drive at normal speed.
It makes no unusual noises.

But....
I can't save files to it any more. Well I can, but saving a large file to it (which would normally take about a minute) takes much longer than it should (20 minutes or more). It saves files uncorrupted even though it takes forever. I've tried it in 2 different computers.

It's the first time I've had a hard drive begin to die like that. Normally they make noises or produce errors when reading/writing etc or take longer than normal to both read and write, but I've never had a drive which works normally except for writing files. Can firmware become corrupted or could it be a component on the circuit board has died?

Just once, I'd really like it if SMART could actually do the job it's designed for and stop telling me a failing drive is fine (I've had drives which were making horrible noises and corrupting files pass SMART). Same applies to hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic utilities. They're generally just as useless.

[Hoser Rob]

Can't say I've had that kind of problem. At least it's giving you lots of warning. And from the sounds of things I don't think it owes you too much at this point. Back it up, say a requiem, bury it.

[nic2k4]

That's a weird one; I've had a drive lose its cache and SMART controller, but that slowed it down. One easy thing you can try, remove the circuit board from the drive and gently rub clean the contacts with a soft white pencil eraser (don't touch the ones on the drive).

[johns0]

Make sure the disc write cache isn't disabled in windows,if it is it will cause the same problems you described,if not just scrub it.

[fritzi93]

It's a WD 320GB drive, around 5 and a half years old...
It (naturally) passes SMART tests with flying colours...
Can firmware become corrupted or could it be a component on the circuit board has died?

I wonder if you're onto something with that last point.

I have a WD3200AVJB-63J5A0 320 GB IDE drive. I'd guess it's maybe 6-7 years old. I mentioned in another thread not too long ago the drive's propensity to fragment, although it's used strictly as a storage drive and doesn't undergo frequent read/writes. It's also quite slow to write large files to, but I'm not sure if that's a function of older tech. Two recent 3 TB drives in the same computer (the HTPC in my computer details), are real screamers by comparison. (I also have several drives longer in the tooth than that one in the office computer that are faster).

S.M.A.R.T. says it's okay, and it makes no untoward noises. I guess I'll keep it in there 'til it croaks. I have duplicates of everything, plus drive image backups.

[betwixt]

The othe thing to check is how the drive is communicating with the motherboard. I'm guessing in view of it's age this an IDE drive so look at the system properties under disc controllers and make sure it is using the fastest DMA transfers possible. Older CDROM/DVD drives used to drop out of DMA mode and revert to PIO mode if there were errors, I'm not sure if the same applied to hard discs but as it's a property of the same controller, quite possibly it does. The errors I'm talking about could be caused by many things, including software hangs so it doesn't necessarily mean bad hardware.

Brian.

[redwudz]

I would agree with what betwixt said. If it is indeed a PATA (IDE) drive, then check to see if the controller is in PIO mode. It can happen with HDDs, but is rarer than with optical drives.

If it's a SATA HDD, try a different cable. Bad cables can cause odd problems. Same with a PATA cable.

I've got quite a few PATA and SATA WD 320GB HDDs that are still running in a couple of my servers as they were the cheapest per GB when I purchased them. No failures, but they are getting old.

[ranchhand]

Run Seagate Seatools for DOS (free, download and burn to a cd and reboot) on the drive; it will give a pass or fail.

[deadrats]

consider what you have told us:

1) you can read from it at normal speed.

2) it runs windows normally.

3) it passes S.M.A.R.T.

4) WD's diagnostic utility says everything is fine.

5) it takes the same amount of time to format as a comparative hard drive.

6) it takes a long time to save large files but the files are not corrupted in any way and they are perfectly usable.

to me it sounds like a heavily fragmented hard drive and/or formatted with an incorrect cluster size.

if the hard drive has been in use for a while and very full i would favor the fragmented drive theory, if the drive has been recently formatted and not that full i would favor the incorrect cluster size theory.

there is also one other possibility, if you are using compression on the drive, that would definitely slow down writes.

right click on the drive and look to see if "compress drive to save disk space" is checked.

[hello_hello]

Thanks for the replies.....

I haven't checked caching or other drive settings etc yet, but I will just to be sure, however I'm fairly certain it's the drive because......

It's a SATA drive.
It's actually been running as part of a dual drive, RAID-0 setup for most of it's life (with another WD 320GB drive). I first noticed the problem because writing large files to that particular RAID volume had slowed considerably, although had it not been for the slow writing I wouldn't have noticed an issue (yet) as the RAID volume was also running Windows at normal speed.

I restored an old image of Windows to the RAID volume which also ran fine, but copying large files from the second RAID volume to the first was still rather slow.

I replaced the drives, created a new RAID volume and re-installed Windows etc, then reformatted both 320GB drives as individual drives (default cluster size). I full-formatted them both at the same time and it took almost exactly the same amount of time to complete. One of those drives on it's own operates at normal speed (reading and writing files). The second one is the problem drive. On it's own, writing files is very, very slow.

I've tested the problem drive using a second computer, two different SATA controllers (Intel and JMicron) and with it sitting in a SATA hard drive dock, so I'm sure it's not a SATA cable problem.

I'll play around with it a little more at some stage, but I can't imagine it's anything other than a problem with the drive.

[jollyjohn]

If the two drives are the same serial No, can you swap over the circuit boards and see what happens?

[hello_hello]

Yeah, they're the same model. It might be fun to experiment just to see what happens. I'll probably give it a go later in the week.

[Mephesto]

Your drive is just being really, really gay. You need to fire up the defagmenter and start the process of defagging it. Good luck.

[hello_hello]

How do you defrag a freshly formatted drive?

[aedipuss]

How do you defrag a freshly formatted drive?

well if you are looney enough to want to, the acme corporation hard drive tools of course.

[Mephesto]

How do you defrag a freshly formatted drive?

Freshly formatted? I had the impression you had a lot of stuff on there. So let's be clear, your drive is empty, you have a fresh OS install on it thus no file fragmentation, it's 5 years old, suffers from no measurable problem except writing really slow?

I would guess your write head is worn out so it is making frequent mistakes and writing to the wrong sectors which get reversed by error-correction firmware but it happens so often that few good writes make it.

As a general rule, replace your HDD every 5 years. An HDD I had since July 2000 started clicking one day in August 2005 and stopped working shortly after. I lost all data on it but did a full backup 2 months before so I lost 2 months worth of new stuff.

I still have that 40GB drive that I got in 2005. It suffers from bad sectors and is now 38GB instead of 40. It's still running but I don't use it anymore and only really used it maybe 3.5 of the 5 guaranteed years.

Another thing is, the more modern an HDD is, the faster it dies because it has more components and moving parts.

SSDs are the new thing. They're crap but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use them.

[johns0]

If you have heavily fragmented hard drive and do a quick format and install it still need to be defragged,just use windows defragger and start it up and analyze the drive to see how bad it is.

[Capmaster]

If you have heavily fragmented hard drive and do a quick format and install it still need to be defragged,just use windows defragger and start it up and analyze the drive to see how bad it is.

This.

And set your Windows swapfile to the same size for min and max. This should minimize fragmenting.

In the future, avoid WD or Maxtor in favor of Seagate. Just my opinion, but a plan that has served me well over the years