Do hard drives "go slow"

shadowdr said:

It may not be the cause of everyones slowdown but service packs seem to go un noticed as the culprits for so many ills.

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Good Point!

Related to what I said earlier, slow downs can be associated to the software on the system and not the drive. When my IT department gave me a laptop three years ago I was disappointed with the performance but too busy to do anything about it. After almost a year I decided to reformat and start over myself. There was literally a 100% performance improvement just because I chose exactly what would be put on the system.

Dukeman said:

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Interesting comments.

I was responsible for delivering on average 7.25 completed PCs per day during the period I encountered these drives. Software means nothing to me. These drives didn't work properly, you can take me directly at my word here. I'll fdisk a system in a flash if it as much as looks gimpy. They ran slow, really slow. Slow like operations that normally would take 30s like loading window would take 5 mintues or more. SlOOOOw.

The failures did not appear to be mechanical. The drives spun and seeked in apprantly normal fashion should the controller instruct them to do so. The seemed to be failures on the pcb of the drive, contact issues or semiconductor failures of one sort or another. This is speculation on my part as to the exact cause.

As far as Storage Review goes, it's not that I have that low of an opinion of them, it's that you cannot infer the existance of any particular phenomena from the amount of coverage devoted to it on that (or any other, for that matter) site.

larva said:

The failures did not appear to be mechanical. The drives spun and seeked in apprantly normal fashion should the controller instruct them to do so. The seemed to be failures on the pcb of the drive, contact issues or semiconductor failures of one sort or another. This is speculation on my part as to the exact cause.

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OK, I just remembered another possible reason for slowdowns, firmware bugs. Every now and then a manufacturer will have a firmware bug (read almost always). Most are ironed out during the OEM qualification of the drive before it goes into a system. However some escapes occur. A firmware bug could explain some slowdown issues since it controls everything. If the drive eventually sends back the correct data before windows completely gives up on the drive then it would be slow but not mechanically or electrically damaged. Firmware issues where a command is rat-holed or the drive starts background activity and does not come back in the specified time could cause slowdowns without data loss.

Firmware - In the shadows and sometimes evil.

I can atest to firmware bugs....

Grr.. just picked up a 160GB wd for a friend this past weekend to put a system together for him. BAH... the drive works sorta. However, fdisk will ONLY find 8GB out of the 160GB. If I take the drive and put it in another system and use partition magic, or the western digital setup program (same thing as the maxtor drive) then I can get access to all 160GB. If I fdisk it with a 160GB partition, the fdisk can see all 160gb in the program. If I unpartition it again, fdisk can only read 8gb.

The major problem is I was trying to install XP Pro on it. Soon as I tried to switch the drive over from fat32 to ntfs the drive would no longer boot and say things like I was missing either c:\windows\system32\hal.dll or I was missing ntldr. When I check the drive after booting up with a seperate hard drive to see if the files were there, they were. If I tried to reformat AS ntfs I would get an illegal cylinder head count. When I viewed the fat32 partition in fdisk it would come up as 5fat32 instead of fat32.

Really, really weird. If I left it at fat32 and installed windows it would run fine unless I tried to put service pack 2 on. Then I would get the same probelm as I had when I tried to switch the partition over to ntfs.

Every single diagnostic I ran on the drive shows it as working correctly. The ONLY thing I can think of is that the firmware is somehow bugged. Grr...

As for the motor.. you CAN have a motor slowdown in a drive and have it effect performance WITHOUT giving errors. There is a certain tolerance limit and some older drives didn't have a time out option either in the firmware for the flyout. They would just keep waiting until what needed to be done got done no matter how long it takes.