What's wrong with my HDD?

[Masterbagger]

Back up your stuff. It's too easy to do and hard drives are too cheap to justify not doing it. A free program like macrium reflect can create an image of whatever drive you installed windows on that you can use to restore it. If you have high volume folders like a collection of movies just put them on a drive and store it somewhere. Some of my data can't be replaced. There is no source to download every episode of Xena: Warrior Princess anymore. My collection was painstakingly harvested from media purchased as a box set of DVD's in Afghanistan from a somewhat shady merchant of bootlegs enriching himself on American dollars from US G.I.'s craving entertainment from home and willing to give dollars to a potential Taliban supporter to see Lucy Lawless in a leather bikini doing cheesy action scenes.

So what I'm saying is plug in a hard drive you won't use, copy all your important stuff, make sure you got windows installation on it, and put it in your closet. Drag it out a couple times a year and update it. If your PC takes a crap like mine did last year you lose months of data vs years. If you have stuff you don't want a thief to take like my own scanned medical, military, and tax records package it all in truecrypt. It's minimal effort and expense with a high payout if you ever need it.

[pjknibbs]

Seems slow for a usb 3 drive. should be up in the 100MB range.

It could be limited by the read speed of the internal drive rather than the write speed of the USB 3, especially if the internal drive is a bit flaky.

[Mightysword]

Seems slow for a usb 3 drive. should be up in the 100MB range.

It could be limited by the read speed of the internal drive rather than the write speed of the USB 3, especially if the internal drive is a bit flaky.

Yep, can verify. I just copy something from my SSD as a test and it's average 140-150mb/sec. So again, I dont really see any disadvantage in using these External Drive. It's a lot smaller than I expected and seem to hella lot more convenience than the internal drive. Do they have the same life expectancy of a regular internal drive? People seem to talk about these drive as a backup option, but what about using it regularly like a normal drive?

[korio]

Seems slow for a usb 3 drive. should be up in the 100MB range.

It could be limited by the read speed of the internal drive rather than the write speed of the USB 3, especially if the internal drive is a bit flaky.

Yep, can verify. I just copy something from my SSD as a test and it's average 140-150mb/sec. So again, I dont really see any disadvantage in using these External Drive. It's a lot smaller than I expected and seem to hella lot more convenience than the internal drive. Do they have the same life expectancy of a regular internal drive? People seem to talk about these drive as a backup option, but what about using it regularly like a normal drive?

If its an external drive but not SSD, they usually are slower than internal drives, also, their life is usually smaller than a internal hard drive, because people use them to move stuff around, so the disk is more likely to fail earlier.

If you are going to use it only as a desk storage, not moving it, and have free usb 3.0 ports on your computer, its a nice solution for external backups and such.

Also if you want to share that stuff between multiple computer at your home, and as a media source, you can consider buying a NAS, they are getting cheaper and cheaper, and gives some functionality for people with various PC at home that can be worth it.

[Sinxar]

If its an external drive but not SSD, they usually are slower than internal drives

That was true before USB 3 and Thunderbolt where the interface was the limiting factor. A modern HDD that peaks around 60MB/s regardless of whether it is external or not is unheard of unless there is something wrong with it.

[korio]

If its an external drive but not SSD, they usually are slower than internal drives

That was true before USB 3 and Thunderbolt where the interface was the limiting factor. A modern HDD that peaks around 60MB/s regardless of whether it is external or not is unheard of unless there is something wrong with it.

I was thinking more of the drive RPM than the transfer speed, anyway, because of the buffer, the rpms or other factor, external drives are usually slower than internal ones.

Ofc everything matters here, so as always, it depends in what you pick and how much $ you use

[pjknibbs]

A modern HDD that peaks around 60MB/s regardless of whether it is external or not is unheard of unless there is something wrong with it.

Peak speed depends heavily on the sizes of the files being copied--if you have a lot of very small ones then the copy speed won't be as good as if you're copying one large one. Don't know if this is a factor here, but it's worth pointing out.

[Morkonan]

How many pictures are in one folder and how are you accessing them?

I only use IrfanView as an example, I can access these folders normally. Plus when the drive start to act up, it'll lock up everything on the drive. I think whenever the problem happens it usually when I access these mega folders, and then it freeze up the drive. I wonder if the large file counts in these folders has some kind of effect.

Are you using a recent version of IRFanview? 32 or 64 bit? There are some issues to consider with filenames, possible long directory-tree structures, if you're not using a 64-bit version. (IIRC from some searching I did a couple of days ago when considering that program's possible input into this issue.)

It's also possible to hang a program with incompatible requests. For instance, I use a really old app to quickly scan for textures. It's what I "know" and it's lightweight, incredibly fast, and easy to use. (A very old copy of ACDC (ASeeDSee/whatever)) But, it can't read non-english characters. Most pics don't have those. But, in order to try to make sure I keep licensing straight, even on unlicensed textures I grab whenever I see something "cool", I will often edit the filename and paste in a reference I can google-foo if needed. If it's a non-standard-English character, the program will NOT read the file or display it. It is written well-enough, as a properly constructed program, to not fatally hang, though, even when presented with such things.

Blah,blah,blah - In short - If you can't duplicate this problem using the standard Windows file-explorer or other programs, I would seriously consider looking at your application as a potential trouble-spot. Download the newest version, since it's free, and try that to see if it reproduces the same faults.

[Hank001]

For some strange reason some sata cables over time develop some problems that sounds like this guys. It's called "crosstalk". It can also lead to slow read times, but hardly any read errors. It's basically points in te cable close to video, audio and such cards heat sources breaking down the substances (isomers) in the cable at the points of greatest heat exposure. In these cases change the cable, solve the problem. If it is the sata cable (And used to happen rarely on old IDE ribbons too) then changing out the drive might not fix the problem.

This might not be the problem, but it might be worth a shot.

[pjknibbs]

Yeah, that's why I suggested swapping the SATA cable out on the previous page.

[Hank001]

Sorry didn't see it.

[Morkonan]

Sorry didn't see it.

No worries. I suggested that as well in my second post. But, then again, nobody pays any attention to the man babbling in the corner of the room...

[Hank001]

Guess I should have at least skimmed prior posts.
Lots of problems cropping up like this with Sata3 systems with 6gb transfer capability and capable drives crapping out because they didn't use Sata3 cables and the crosstalk develops faster.
There are schematics for cable checkers out there but they are quite involved and I can sum them up by saying that if there's a question about them then you're better off getting a new cable.

Recently I was hit with the Sata connection block on the motherboard parting from some of the solder connections because of a cable stressing at an angle. A lot of cursing, tedoius soldering job, drive format and reload from backup and back to work in an an hour and a half for me.

For people who don't fiddle with tech hardware as a hobby there's more to drive problems than the drive itself. I'll give myself a DUH on that one.