Major HD problem - why?

[drgonzo]

I am running an ASUS Z9000 laptop with a 60gb 5400RPM Toshiba drive.
Just last night the system started running extremely slow and freezing up at times. It would also take at least 2x as long or longer to boot up and shutdown.

When I tested the drive's speed, it was only accessing at 2mb/s. Now, not knowing if this was some sort of a controller issue on the motherboard or a harddrive problem, I decided to install my secondary (backup) harddrive in its place and load on Windows. The secondary drive works fine... normal speeds. So then, putting in the original drive into an external enclosure on a usb port I tested the speed again - this time it was getting about 1mb/s.

So now that I determined that something happened to the original drive to make it run at a snail's place, the question is, what happened? Was it heat?
What can cause something like this, and how can I prevent it in the future?
At least the drive is not completely dead (yet) so that I can still recover the data from it.

Any ideas?

Thanks for your help.

[ktkendall]

I doubt there is anything you should have or could have done differently, especially cause it is a laptop, there isn't much of anything you can do to change the cooling on most laptops. Everything electronic and mechanical is fallible especially harddrives cause they are electronic and mechanical combined in 1 device.. Get any of your important data off there while the getting is good, that drive will probably fail completely real soon..

[Panama Red]

Two things I tell clients to be aware of with a laptop.

1 - Don't drop it! That can damage the backlight or the hard drive.

2 - Don't use the laptop on a soft surface like a bed or your lap. Fabric can restrict the air flow or, worse yet, plug up the air vents completely causing overheating.

Don't know if either of these apply to you Doc. Just thought they were worth mentioning.

[drgonzo]

I have occassionally used it on a pillow or my lap, but not recently. It was on my desk for the entire day when this happened.

So do you figure that heat caused this problem?

Has anyone heard of a hard drive suddenly dropping in speed like this?
If it is definately heat related, I will be more careful in the future. Is there any other possible cause? Could it be another internal electronic problem that I should have checked out? I don't need to spend $100++ just to destroy another drive.

I just hope I can get the data copied to my new drive before it completely fails. Afterall, the USB transfer rate is only 1mb/s... it will take ages! Any suggestions? I was just going to directly copy the data partition, and ghost over the OS partition.

[gary_hendricks]

Hi drgonzo

I'm not sure why the original hard drive failed. It could be due to bad sectors or a heavily fragmnented disk. Was it like this before?

Yes, I recommend backing up that data quickly.

[drgonzo]

I've never had any problems with this drive before... its 2 years old with no bad sectors and I defrag about every week or two (not usually more than 1% fragmentation on the 10gb OS partition).
One of those possible causes listed a power spike...
I am living in Indonesia at the moment, where the power is sometimes unreliable, and I do not use a spike protector. Would the adaptor allow a spike to pass?

[glc]

I don't think that there was necessarily a direct cause for the problem. Hard drives are among the highest failure items in computers simply because they are electromechanical devices. Toshiba laptop hard drives are not historically the most reliable drives out there anyway - and being that they are a lot smaller physically than desktop hard drives, laptop drives are going to have a higher likelihood of early failures. I've seen desktop drives fail in the same manner with the same symptoms - it happens.

Toshiba does not offer any diagnostic hard drive utilities, but the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test can test any brand drive. I wouldn't do this till your data is safe somewhere, but afterwards you can run the diags to confirm the problem. There is a good possibility the drive may still be under warranty and you can get a free replacement.

I would try to clone the drive to your backup drive so you can just drop it in and keep working. Yes, it may take forever, but you can let it run all night.