Is something wrong with my harddrive?

I just have to ask, I've had a WD 250gb 5400rpm hd for a while now and just can't seem to understand why it is so slow. I've been thinking some program is causing it or so, but even after a full win XP reinstall it's still the same. Sometimes it feels like it can't even perform the easiest of tasks, like just opening My Computer sometimes goes in an instant (like it should) but sometimes can take as much as 10 seconds Also unraring files seems to be taking WAAAY too long time. Is over 3 minutes for a 1gb file normal with such "new" hardware? Not to mention what happens when I try to do two or even three things at once. If I try to open firefox while unraring and maybe open My Documents all at once, it takes AGES. And I'm talking hell of a lot slower than year old computers I've had before.

Hope someone has a clue what this might be, I'm running win XP sp 3 with Core2Duo t7300 2ghz and 2gb memory.

 

run some tests on it. Download and run HDTune to see what the read speeds are. Post an image of the results.

It's possible that it is operating in PIO mode, check your hard disk controllers in device manager.

 

Speed in HDTune is great, average of 55mb/s. HDTune says it's running in UDMA Mode 7 UltraATA/512. Average access time is 18.4ms. Problem persists regardless of amount of data on the disk (i.e. directly after win XP reinstall and there's nearly nothing on it, it's still like this).

Any more ideas?

 

Hi.

run this on it.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=703&sid=3&lang=en

Regards

John.

 

Both SMART and extended test was passed with no problems encountered...

 

Any other ideas?

 

Can you run a benchmark in HD Tune and attach the screenshot ?

 

When you were (re)installing XP did you notice if the install was going slower(file copying especially) or at "normal" speed?

 

just because unraring ect is going slow doesn't mean it's the hdd all the tests so far lead me to believe it isn't the hdd but another piece of hardware instead.

 

Go to Device Manager > right-click the drive > Properties > policies tab > check both write caching on the disk and advanced performance options.

Try running an HDtune test before and after.

 

Normal

Question is, what that would be?

They were already checked

Here is the HDtune:

 

That looks fine.

There's a big drop in one place which would be caused by something else accessing the HDD during the test. Maybe you need to check what else is running on the computer.

John

 

The drive is performing just fine. Notice those pings. That is windows using up the HDD in the background. It can be anything - antivirus, indexes are being built, pagefile (if the whole physical memory has been used up)....etc

Check out the XP Tweaks and Tips Guide, and make a system restore if you apply any of those tweaks.

 

Applied a load of those tweaks, system runs nicer now, but I'm still having the same problems with drive being slow for certains tasks etc... oh well.