I've recently (for about a month or so) been having issues with one of my secondary hard drives. When accessing data it, sometimes it will hang for a few seconds, causing the program doing the reading to also lag. For example, in video games being run off the drive, about every 30 seconds the game will hang for about 4-5 seconds, and in Visual Studio saving a file often causes the whole IDE to hang for about 5-10 seconds.
I have two identical drives (Hitachi 7K3000 – 2TB), and only one of them is displaying this issue. I ran HD Tune on both to compare their read speeds:
The faulty drive:
The normal drive:
Note how in the first image it took some time at the beginning to start.
I also ran the "Extra tests" in HD Tune:
http://i40.tinypic.com/keygcg.png – Faulty drive (note the ridiculous initial random seek time)
http://i43.tinypic.com/28vbtd5.png – Normal drive
How might I fix this issue? Maybe copy the data to the currently normal hard drive (which doesn't have anything useful on it) and reformat the faulty one? The drive is still under warranty, so maybe just RMA it? Other suggestions? My boot drive is a separate SSD so my options are pretty flexible.
Best Answer
Have you considered the possibility of the connections on the controller? Like, swap which sata cable is connected to each, and which port on Mobo or Sata Controller? It is rare, but it is still minutely possible the issue exists somewhere between the HDD and the mobo, and not the drive itself.