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meerkt
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HDD super slow to access, including during POST

Thu May 04, 2017 3:32 pm

I have a fishy Seagate HDD extracted from a troubled AIO.

* Any access to it is super slow, including long delays during POST.
* It's slow in 2 computers I tried it on, and in an external USB enclosure.
* There are no read retry noises, but I still suspect bad sectors in a critical place.
* The few files I read slowly off it are okay.
* Basic tests with Seagate's Windows diagnosis tool pass okay, though take forever.
* smartctl didn't manage to read the SMART stats, maybe because of a timeout.
* smartctl does show the SMART log, though, where there are multiple reports of an uncorrectable error at LBA 0x0FFF,FFFF (=~137GB). That's a strangely round number, so I don't know if to trust it.

Any idea how to get around the slowdown so that I could copy the data without it taking forever?
 
Vhalidictes
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Re: HDD super slow to access, including during POST

Thu May 04, 2017 3:45 pm

If it's a crucial sector, try to get it marked as bad. The slowness could be from endless retrying to recover data near that sector. It also could be that more and more sectors are going bad, requiring rewrites, but SMART data would usually show that as an ever-increasing read-error count.

It's not normally a thing any more, but one thing you could try is removing and re-creating a whole-drive primary partition and then formatting it at normal speeds. This could take a while, but assuming that the sector-marking is happening correctly it afterwards it shouldn't be any slower than a normal new drive.

Worst-case you could try and find a low-level format utility, but that isn't an option for all drives. BTW, what's the model number?
 
meerkt
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Re: HDD super slow to access, including during POST

Thu May 04, 2017 4:18 pm

It's a 2TB Barracuda 7200.14 (ST2000DM001, P/N 1CH164-510). Apparently the "friendly name" nowadays is just "Desktop HDD". According to info from rml527 it's likely a 2 platter variant.

I'm not sure it's all the drive's fault. Besides being in an AIO I think it spent time being stored in a car's trunk. The AIO's problems started before, but I don't know if it included HDD issues initially. Maybe related, SMART 0xBE ("airflow temperature") shows that the worst value was below the threshold value.

Anyway, now that I've managed to read the SMART stats with a Windows program it definitely looks bad. About 3K pending sectors, and 31K reallocated.

Is there any program to scan for bad sectors, report which files or system areas they are in, and optionally rewrite/force reallocate just them?
 
Vhalidictes
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Re: HDD super slow to access, including during POST

Thu May 04, 2017 4:58 pm

You should probably stick a fork in that drive.

I'm not going to get into all the gritty details about spare area on spinning rust drives, but I can give you a rule of thumb: "Five figures of bad sectors = RMA that drive".

If you're certain that the number of bad sectors isn't increasing over time, you could do something involving backed-up / ephemeral data with this drive, but even then I'd be suspicious of it.

The standard Windows (slow/full) format function in Disk Administrator (diskmgmt.msc) should be marking sectors bad without any additional software needed.
 
meerkt
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Re: HDD super slow to access, including during POST

Thu May 04, 2017 5:08 pm

I need to get the existing data off the drive first.
And an average rate of less than 200KB/sec isn't going to get me far.
 
Vhalidictes
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Re: HDD super slow to access, including during POST

Thu May 04, 2017 5:12 pm

I hope it lasts long enough to pull the data out!
 
meerkt
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Re: HDD super slow to access, including during POST

Thu May 04, 2017 5:18 pm

:)

I hope I find a way to appease it and make it go quicker. Whether by reallocating pending sectors or something else.
 
Vhalidictes
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Re: HDD super slow to access, including during POST

Thu May 04, 2017 5:23 pm

meerkt wrote:
:)

I hope I find a way to appease it and make it go quicker. Whether by reallocating pending sectors or something else.


Oh. Well, there is a way. The problem being that it might not be any faster.

So, delete all partitions. Run recovery software (I use R-Studio NTFS http://www.r-studio.com/).

In theory, since the Windows disk driver stops trying to endlessly validate and recover data, the drive will stop re-allocating sectors as quickly and you can get the data off faster.

In reality 1) any drive-initiated garbage collection will still be going on, and 2) a software license for R-Studio can cost as much as $100, and 3) it will take time (hours) for the recovery software to find everything on the drive.

Question: Did you turn off Windows Search on the drive? That could make everything grind to a halt if there are bad sectors.
 
meerkt
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Re: HDD super slow to access, including during POST

Thu May 04, 2017 6:23 pm

I'm doing the copying on a Linux LiveCD, with the partition of interest mounted read-only (the other partitions are OEM/EFI fluff).

Partition deletion sounds like something that might end up making life more difficult. I don't know how writes behave, and right now I can at least mount it plainly.
 
Broortedino
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HDD super slow to access including during POST

Fri Aug 25, 2017 10:05 am

No idea, unless it might be a bios issue or something wrong with the nvme itself. Doe the nvme work okay in another computer?
 
just brew it!
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Re: HDD super slow to access, including during POST

Fri Aug 25, 2017 10:14 am

With the state that drive is in, anything you do is likely to just make matters worse. Recover what you can, or write it off as a total loss. A drive with that many bad sectors is effectively a paperweight.
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TwistedKestrel
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Re: HDD super slow to access, including during POST

Fri Aug 25, 2017 11:08 am

Vhalidictes wrote:
meerkt wrote:
:)

I hope I find a way to appease it and make it go quicker. Whether by reallocating pending sectors or something else.


Oh. Well, there is a way. The problem being that it might not be any faster.

So, delete all partitions. Run recovery software (I use R-Studio NTFS http://www.r-studio.com/).

In theory, since the Windows disk driver stops trying to endlessly validate and recover data, the drive will stop re-allocating sectors as quickly and you can get the data off faster.

In reality 1) any drive-initiated garbage collection will still be going on, and 2) a software license for R-Studio can cost as much as $100, and 3) it will take time (hours) for the recovery software to find everything on the drive.

Question: Did you turn off Windows Search on the drive? That could make everything grind to a halt if there are bad sectors.


You can also mark the important stuff as read-only with diskpart. I forget if that's at the drive or partition level
 
Captain Ned
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Re: HDD super slow to access, including during POST

Fri Aug 25, 2017 11:11 am

Yes, it's a necro, but the OP mentioning 137GB leads me to believe that there's a 48-bit LBA issue underlying everything here, especially coming out of an All In One box.
What we have today is way too much pluribus and not enough unum.
 
meerkt
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Re: HDD super slow to access, including during POST

Fri Aug 25, 2017 11:17 am

Thanks. Old thread from 3 months ago. Maybe Broortedino replied to the wrong one as there's no NVMe mentioned here.

I copied what I could until the HDD stopped being accessible.

The 0x0FFF:FFFF LBA thing is odd, but surely unrelated to the 48-bit size limit of yore. This was solved 15 years ago.

Mitigating points aside -- being inside an AIO, spending extended time in a car trunk, a Dell model with multiple user reports of similar issues -- I still partially consider it another bad showing from Seagate.

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