Windows – 1 TB WD Black WD1001FALS suddenly extremely slow

backupdata-recoveryhard drivewindows 7

I have and internal hard drive disk, 1TB Western Digital WD Black WD1001FALS, that suddenly got really slow. It just happened as I was using my computer normally for daily tasks, with no sign of problem whatsoever before. The drive is around 5 or 6 years old, I think, and was working great until now.

Everytime I try to access it, the computer just gets really slow, and takes 10 seconds to 30 seconds to list a folder. Sensing that the drive was failing, I've tried a multitude of things:

Running chkdsk /r – Passes the first 3 phases without any problem, gets to 194th sector of the 4th phase and just hangs there for hours and hours.

Boot on Ubuntu Live CD and tried to copy the files to another drive. The speeds are extremely slow, so I just gave up (only 25GB in 12 hours).

While in Ubuntu, run TestDisk, dd_rescue or just dd. All of them ended up with the same result, super slow speeds.

I'm currently using Acronis True Image WD Edition to create a drive image. It's faster than the previous tools, but it's still very slow. I have 750 GB of data that is very important – work related, personal family photos – and I can't lose it, so I really can't give up on the drive yet.

Is there anything I can do to speed up the process? I think the problem is that the sectors aren't marked as bad, so the data can still be read but takes huge amounts of time to do so. I wish I could just skip the problematic sectors automatically, but even using the above tools with settings to skip bad sectors, they keep being read and so the process is exhausting. Should I wait and see if Acronis can finish the backup or try something like a recovery service? I've heard they charge you quite a bit, and I'm afraid I can't pay that expense at the moment if that's true.

Here is a screenshot of the SMART data:

enter image description here

My motherboard is an ASUS P6T Deluxe, running the drives in AHCI mode, using Intel RST 9.6 drivers, everything else is up to date. I'm backing up to a new 3TB WD Green HDD.

Best Answer

You have a warning about Reallocated Sectors Count:

Count of reallocated sectors. When the hard drive finds a read/write/verification error, it marks that sector as "reallocated" and transfers data to a special reserved area (spare area). This process is also known as remapping, and reallocated sectors are called "remaps". The raw value normally represents a count of the bad sectors that have been found and remapped. Thus, the higher the attribute value, the more sectors the drive has had to reallocate. This allows a drive with bad sectors to continue operation; however, a drive which has had any reallocations at all is significantly more likely to fail in the near future. While primarily used as a metric of the life expectancy of the drive, this number also affects performance. As the count of reallocated sectors increases, the read/write speed tends to become worse because the drive head is forced to seek to the reserved area whenever a remap is accessed. If sequential access speed is critical, the remapped sectors can be manually marked as bad blocks in the file system in order to prevent their use.

You should replace the HDD as soon as possible.

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