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Are these HD transfer rates normal?

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trents

Senior Member
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
A customer's computer is slower than the 7 year itch and has always been that way. I've worked on it several times over the past couple of years or so and I even set it up for them when they bought it. Takes almost 10 minutes for the disk activity to subside after bootup and any kind of scan such as for viruses/malware takes much longer than it seems it should. Performance just seems to be sluggish in general but mostly anything needing to access disk.

I've checked startup in Task Manager and nothing suspicious there as well as processes. Nothing suspicious. I'm still doing different scans for malware but nothing noteworth so far. CPU activity is minimal and memory use looks normal.

This an HP AIO with i5 3330S CPU, 8 GB of RAM and a 2TB Seagate 7200 rpm disk. Disk is about 30% full. Windows 10. So it's a fairly capable machine.

Here are the results of some hard disk testing I did. Does anything seem abnormal here with the disk performance? Looks like to me HD Tune Pro is showing some wacky and erratic dips in performance.

I'm wondering if there are some broken Windows system files causing this? I'm running sfc /scannow as I type this.
 

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If you re-run HD Tune several times, is that dip repeatable?

CDM and atto don't shout out anything obvious to me, but they only test a relatively small area of the disk so if there is a problem elsewhere they may not show it.

Use software (like crystal disk info) and check out the SMART for anything unusual.

Download the Seagate diagnostics (can't remember name) and try a read only scan of the surface. Check SMART again, make sure there are no pending sectors.
 
I did check out the SMART info with Crystaldiskinfo and also HD Tune Pro. No issues reported.

Thanks for the other advice. Right now I'm doing a boot time scan with Bitdefender for rootkits.
 
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Second test with HD Tune Pro
 

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Well I cloned the customer's hard disk. I just happened to have a slightly used drive of exactly the same model laying around. Took the back cover off the AIO and stuck the new drive in. Powered up and no boot, nothing on screen. Computer sounded like it was in a boot loop. I pulled the new drive and put the old one back in. No go. No boot, now video. Tried booting from a Linux Live DVD to no avail. Lights come on but no video and no boot. Took cover back off and checked for dislodged cables. Everything was intact. I think the motherboard died. Man I hate it when someone's computer dies on my watch and I have to tell them it went by by. It will happen occasionally, however.
 
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