Hard drive slows down Win7 and r/w takes forever.

Hi, bought a new PC last summer and it worked perfect until 2 months ago. I noticed the boot was taking longer time than usual and reading and writing to the hd took forever. The hard drive is a WD Desktop Green 1TB, and I got a Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB where I have Win7 that works fine. When i first started troubleshooting I somewhere got an I/O-error, but i don't remember where that was. I've tried formating and "CHKDSK D: /X /R", but it stops at stage 4. Some other threads on this forum suggested running MiniTool Partition Wizard and running "Surface Test" but when i click "Start Now" the program crashes. In "Computer Management" the hd shows as being healthy. So anyone got any suggestions? Help is much appreciated. Thanks.

You say you tried formatting. Did that even partially complete?

Download the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic tool for that drive from Western Digital. It can do a quick test and an extended test and will display SMART data for it.

Start with the SMART data and see if it gives you any warnings. If not, try the quick test.

Thanks for help, the formatting was complete and there is no data on the drive.
I started the Quick Test and i got an error almost immediately: "Quick Test on drive 2 did not complete! Status code = 07 (Failed read test element), Failure Checkpoint = 97(Unknown Test) Smart self-test did not complete on drive 2!". I'm now running extended test, which haven't been giving errors yet (Elapsed Time 5min). Got 3 years warranty on the PC, just hoped it was something I could fix on my own.

I did an extended test on my 1.5 TB Western Digital last night just for kicks. It took 5 hours, so yours may take 3 or 4.

If it finds errors, it may try to fix them.

I'm not sure how WD handles RMAs, but you may qualify just because you can't read SMART data and failed the quick test. Probably time to get in touch with them, but let the extended test try to complete in the meantime.

Make note of the test results as shown in Data Lifeguard. I'm not sure if WD will want to know exactly what the tests returned.

Estimated Time Remaining just went from 11:00 to 26217:27:12, and rising.

I can let it run for 5-6 hours, but i guess nothing much will have happened until then.

Dreanh said:

Estimated Time Remaining just went from 11:00 to 26217:27:12, and rising.

My 5 hours was for a drive that ultimately had no errors.

That figure of yours almost certainly indicates errors are being found.

I'd let it run at least 12 or 18 hours, but in the meantime assume it will result in failure or uncorrectable errors, so I'd spend time examining WD's return procedures while you wait.

Ok, will let it run for as long as it wants (unless it's 65000 days, ain't nobody got time for that). Thanks for the help!

Yeah, not even WD would expect you to run it for a hundred hours, let alone thousands. Run it overnight or so and contact WD.

You won't get a lot of detail out of it even if it completes--just a pass or fail. I assume any fail is good enough for a warranty claim, but I haven't checked. It will try to replace bad sectors to an extent, but a drive only has a limited supply of them.

I've got a new Green 3 TB coming in the mail tomorrow and am concerned about it. Drives don't seem to be as reliable as they once were and switching brands is no help. They are just becoming disposable.