Is this hard drive performance indicative of drive failure?

Question

I suspect that this is a newbie question - but I suspect that my hard drive might be failing - so I installed HD Tune Pro to run some tests. My read performance was an average of 27MB per sec (minimum 0.2, maximum 56) with an access time of 26ms and a burst rate of 47.4 Mb/s. (see below as well)

My question is how to compare this data? I tried to go to manufacturer website but had trouble finding similar statistics.

Is there an easier way? Where can I find benchmarks to interpret this data?

HD Tune Pro: Hitachi HTS545016B9A Benchmark

Test capacity: full

Read transfer rate
Transfer Rate Minimum : 0.2 MB/s
Transfer Rate Maximum : 56.7 MB/s
Transfer Rate Average : 27.1 MB/s
Access Time           : 25.5 ms
Burst Rate            : 47.4 MB/s
CPU Usage             : 21.7%

Answer 1

Harddrive performance is going to vary wildly while the drive is in use, and from what you've described, it sounds like that disk was likely in use during the tests (perhaps it is your C:\ drive?).

In any case, I'm not sure how stable disk speeds are within specific models or generations from a manufactuer, but if you're really just wanting to know if the disk is close to failure, you'll be better off looking at the S.M.A.R.T data for the drive, which can show you other useful statistics such as how many bad sectors the drive has or how many times it encountered an uncorrectable read error.