Hard drive about to die?!?!?!

This is reffering to my zv5000 i recently fixed it but everthing ran slow. The whole system ran slower then a lesser version of an amd system with less ram and everthing.( under vista ). Anyways do you think this is signs of a bad hard drive i ran hd tune and the results came back horrible.

Transfer Rate
Minimum .02mb/s
maximum 8.2mb/s
average 5.4mb/s

Access Time
22.4ms
Burst Rate 59.4mb/s
cpu usage 51.9% ( ever time the harddrive light is on the system slows down)

So i belive this hard drive might be going had a 51% cpu usage to read the hard drive is terribly slow it lags down on opening the start menu and adding new internet explorer tabs. Anyways the hard drive is a toshiba MK6021GAS.
thanks.

 

http://www3.toshiba.co.jp/storage/english/spec/hdd/mk6021gs.htm i just found thoes toshiba specifications on the hard drive if that helps.

 

Oh and the hard drive has 19333 power on hours... looking bad

 

Break out the piggy bank and buy a new one

 

I think the CPU usage in HDTune is the total usage, not just that needed for testing the HDD, so that's not a good indicator. Something else was keeping the CPU busy. Look in Task Manager and see what is clocking up the CPU ime.

The 19333 hours is high - that's over 2 years of 24/7 operation or over 4 years of 12 hours per day. Is that realistic?

The SMART data should show if the HDD is having problems. Download the trial version of ActiveSMART and see what it reports.

John

 

wow, yeah, its probably time for a new harddrive. 19,000+ hours is really long for laptop harddrives. usually they die around 7,000-10,000.

Thats an ata/pata/ide harddrive. I suggest upgrading to the Samsung Hm160HC to maximize your performance. It is currently the fastest harddrive for that interface, with speeds on average of 52mb/sec.

It sounds like you also reinstalled the operating system with a fix. If I assume correct, than the harddrive is on its last legs. Usually harddrives become slow when excessive amnounts of software are installed, and they continualy run in the background, eating up all your harddrive speed and putting more strain on the drive.

if you have not reinstalled the os in a while, I recommend running msconfig, and shutting off background processes, services and startup applications.

That should speed things up a bit

K-TRON

 

Actually the computer under this hard drive has been slow since day one of installing windows within the past week or 2. As a quick test i took a hard drive from another computer thats also 4200rpm and 60gb but this one has 2900 hours vs 19333 and it runs a worlds of a diffrence better no more lagging to do meager tasks. Also ill look into that harddrive you reccomended thanks.

 

Also as a side note on the hard drive is from a 3-4 year old toshiba p15 i got for free so im not sure of its past life. It still runs fine maybe ill turn it into a external drive for USB because usb is slower then the slow drive all ready lol.

 

Ok well i downloaded the trail version of active Smart 2.62 and the results all come back for health as OK the drive is running at 39*c which isnt too hot. The only thing i noticed thats odd is in HD tune "reallocated sector count" is in yellow it says " current 100 worst 100 threashhold 50 data 220 status ok" im not sure why its in yellow its not in yellow on the other hard drive or any other computer iv seen.

 

That HDD is a few generations old and is inherently slower. I've just looked in SiSoftware Sandra's results database and the slightly newer MK8034GSX 60GB managed about 15MB/s.

One thing to check: Go into the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers in Device Manager: What are the current transfer rates of the two IDE channels? I start to wonder if the HDD is in PIO mode, which is slow and CPU-intensive.

However, the real fix is a new HDD. You could put that old one into an enclosure but it has clocked up so many hours that I wouldn't use it for any critical backups.

John

 

lol ill probaly just use it for moving things larger then the size of my flash drive like pictures and recorded tv shows. Also i did check that earlier its checked to ultra DMA mind you i am running vista here. Also how does a http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149042 look i think im going to go with a toshiba drive because this one has been so good.

 

19334 hours woohoo.

 

if simply swapping HDDs gave you that much of a performance gain, then i guess you know the answer... even if the OLDER GENERATION HDD is working within it's design specs and is not in danger of dying any second... it's my oppinion that a NEW HDD would make your laptop much more useful and after moving your data to a NEW DRIVE then you should have much more piece of mind and a drive w/ your data backed up too

 

That is relatively slow compared to the latest HDDs. As noted above, you can get 160GB on one platter which will give much better transfer rates than 120GB on 2 platters. The Toshiba xx34GSX family is quite old.

John

 

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0248233 hows that one. ( that store is close to me and its cheap ) Also how do i tell how how many platters the hard drive has?

 

That WD1200 is SATA. I think you need IDE (Parallel ATA - 44 pin connector), which limits your choice. This 120GB Fujitsu is MHV... so it is a fairly old model (the latest are MHZ). Or a little more gets the 160GB WD.

Normally, the manufacturer's datasheet will indicate the number of heads used for the different capacities: 1 or 2 heads means 1 platter, 3 or 4 heads means 2 platters. Unfortunately, the WD datasheet is silent on this aspect and the buffer-disk transfer rate is not among the best (go to the 250GB and 320GB HDDs and you will see much higher numbers).

By the way, here's the spec of that 6021GAS.

John

 

Woops i wasent looking at the interface. I ment this one http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0259019.

 

go for the samsung drive, cause you can get it for about $65 shipped from lagoom or other online stores. Its definitely woth every penny cause it will give you a new definition of fast.

K-TRON

 

Well i didnt see your message untill it was too late i was down near the microcenter today and me and my parents went to the microcenter and bought a wd1200beve-00wtz0 for $60 its 120gb 5400rpm drive it gets me 35mb/s this thing blows the other one away its WAYYYYYY faster. Ill be fine with this drive even though the samsung is faster this is mainly a back up computer.

 

Are you sure a normal laptop harddrive only lives normally 10'000hours? That would mean that i must swap the harddrive once a year. I think that seems very low. What have you gotten that information on that 2.5" hard drives dies about those hours?!

I recently bought my WD3200BEKT for example, and it's already been running for 3144hours as we speak

Why i'm asking is that i'm getting worried, so i innerly hope you're only guessing/trying to make sense and really not know what you talk about.

 

Well I havent seen very many drives run for more than 10,000 hrs, and the ones which I have which have ran that long started to face problems. I guess it really depends on the manufacturer. 10,000hrs is still a very long time that the drives are running, so within that time the drive will probably take a lot of beating
10,000 was a clear estimate on my part. Your drive may last 50,000hrs. I dont know. It depends on how well it was engineered and how well you take care of it.

K-TRON

 

Oh i see

When i use my logic, i'd say a normal hard drive will run 15'000 to 50'000 without a problem.

Let's take an example.

Seagate and WD has 5year warranty on some of their products. This warranty should be counted as a use of about 8-10hours per day, there is 356 days per year so, simple math gets me to about 16'000hours on 5years(8-10hrs/day use). On some systems they run 24/7, that would make the drives gets run for ~42'000hours under the warranty period.


So yeah, like you say, it may run up to 50'000hours without a problem if you take care of it. And that makes most sense to me atleast

Thanks K-TRON!