New hybrid drive (Seagate Desktop SHDD) suddenly is slowing down.

Question

I have a two months old 2TB Seagate Desktop SSHD.

I’m running this SSHD as a secondary drive (have an SSD running as boot), being a "backup" drive.

I've created two partitions with it:

• one with 1.5TB
• one with 300GB'ish

Suddently whenever requesting anything from that drive, the response time is VERY slow. At a point it was slow and next day alright again, however the last 4-5 days it has been consistantly slow.

I experience the following:

• When clicking through folders and (usually) reaching some 2-3 inner folder index, the SSDH stops up and VERY slowly loads (with progress bar) before the folder renders

• Writing to a file (like .txt, .php, .js /whatever) *saving work - takes 3-4 secs everytime saving

• I have noticed that the drive would very often say some "tick" noises, like it was "thinking", even when nothing really would be happening on the computer.

• Under "Joblist > Disc profiling - I don't see anything unusual pingin' out here (without knowing much about processes)

I have tried the following:

• Right click on the drive and run for the disc for errors > nothing found

• Under "Storage"/"Disk Management" under status it says "E: + D: > Status: Ok, primary partion" (whereas the C: says "Boot, Chrashdump, Primary partion")

Any suggestions on further "debugging" or things I could check or do before considering sending it back to the supplier?

Answer 1

Usually the slow speeds are indicators of a failing drive, so it was a good decision to run chkdsk on it to see what the results will be. However, in order to be sure I'd suggest to run another test but this time instead of the OS tool I will recommend to check in the official manufacturer website if a diagnostic tool is available to use and run a test with it since this software will be tuned to the firmware of the drive.

Before doing so don't forget to backup your most important data in order to prevent any potential data loss.

Hope this helps and let us know how it went.

Answer 2

Unusual sounds and intermittent slow response usually indicates a failing drive. Get your data copied to another drive and pull the misbehaving hard drive out of service.

Answer 3

You should prevent the 2nd HDD to sleep:

To prevent the Hard Disk from going to sleep, click on the Battery / Power icon in the taskbar and select More Power options. In the Control Panel windows which opens, select Change Plan settings for your current Power Plan. In the next window, select Change advanced power settings.

In the Power Options box that opens, click the + sign next to the Hard Disk option. Here you will see the required settings under Turn off hard disk after heading. Change the value to 0.

This should improve the response time of the second HDD.

Answer 4

You should turn off the SSHD write caching policy