Extremely slow HDD (read and write)

Hello.

I'm having problems with an almost full (97% full) Western Digital 1.5 TB 7200 RPM HDD.
If I try to read from it or write to it, it takes so long it's practically unusable. Even just loading up a directory in Windows Explorer may take multiple seconds.

I ran HD Tune Pro and the Health tab said the drive has unstable sectors (Number of unstable sectors: 1456), so I ran chkdsk /f, but HD Tune Pro still says the same thing and the drive is still sluggish.

HD Tune Pro also reports a high number of Interface CRC Errors for all my drives (even those that work fine).

What do I do?


EDIT: The error scan feature of HD Tune Pro does find some errors (9.8% damaged blocks). How do I fix these if chkdsk /f failed to do so?

chkdsk is a dinosaur and it's not a miracle worker, try chkdsk /R for recovery and includes the /F, if you doubt it, do chkdsk /? At 97% full, probably not enough space for recovering much anyway, 3% < 9.8%.

9.8% is a ridiculous amount, like PSCO said, HD is to point it's lucky it's working at all, backup what you need to another drive, I wouldn't even give that thing power until I had another drive ready for transferring.

You did check the cables and defragged the HD regularly right?

Did you forget to mention how many times you dropped it?

WD has its Data Lifeguard utility to check it with. Listed among these:
7 Free Hard Drive Testing Software Tools
I'll reiterate, copy you data to another drive, I suspect this one will die soon.

kornflex said:

Thanks for the responses.

Backing up was the first thing I did, naturally.
chkdsk /R is the next thing I'll try.

I understand it might be failing. I used the word "might", because I really don't know the symptoms of a failing drive — I've never had one fail so far. There's first time for everything, I guess.

I dropped it a total of zero times. I haven't used it as a tennis paddle either. The front case fan was dead for some time, though. The temperature of the hard drive was around 40°C.

40 is normal if it was like 60 then there would be a problem also do you here clicking or clunking noises
failing hardrives have a tendency to have tons of bad file sectors and if they are to bad to be fixed then you have partial drive use and very slow response time it may be you have a corrupt file blocks that need to be corrected or it has been to damaged from either ware and tear or just giving up the ghost completely if you know what I mean