Frequent hdd access, horrible performance

The rellocated sectors means that sectors on your disk were found to be bad and have been replaced by good sectors that the drive has kept in reserve. This can effect performance significantly and could be the harbinger for complete failure of the disk. I would back it up and replace it immediately.

I would quit defragmenting that drive as well to limit damage. defragmenting can move bad sectors from one file to another corrupting more files.

Gene

Your power on hours suggests your drive may be well within it's warranty period. If so then backup and replace.

Chkdsk /r found nothing. I've verified that the problem occurs in the guest account, just much less often. I wonder why that is? Anyway, everyone seems in agreement that this is a HDD problem, so I guess it's replacement time.

Code:

Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.

A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.                         

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)...
  326144 file records processed.                                          File verification completed.
  279 large file records processed.                                      0 bad file records processed.                                        2 EA records processed.                                              60 reparse records processed.                                       CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 5)...
  400486 index entries processed.                                         Index verification completed.
  0 unindexed files scanned.                                           0 unindexed files recovered.                                       CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)...
  326144 file SDs/SIDs processed.                                         Cleaning up 16 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 16 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 16 unused security descriptors.
Security descriptor verification completed.
  37172 data files processed.                                            CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
  35668136 USN bytes processed.                                             Usn Journal verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
  326128 files processed.                                                 File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
  117454774 free clusters processed.                                         Free space verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.

 732469247 KB total disk space.
 262064344 KB in 285742 files.
    135432 KB in 37173 indexes.
         0 KB in bad sectors.
    450375 KB in use by the system.
     65536 KB occupied by the log file.
 469819096 KB available on disk.

      4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
 183117311 total allocation units on disk.
 117454774 allocation units available on disk.

Internal Info:
00 fa 04 00 6e ed 04 00 04 c4 08 00 00 00 00 00  ....n...........
0c 0a 00 00 3c 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ....<...........
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................

Windows has finished checking your disk.
Please wait while your computer restarts.

In case you were still interested, mjf:

I noticed your thread here. Is there any reason I should expect such a performance difference normally, or is this the result of the reallocation etc?

did you do chkdsk /f or /r? Looks like /f which only checks t logical consistency in the filesystem not for bad sectors (/r finds and corrects bad sectors).

If it were 1 or two sectors involved, it probably would not be a significant worry. But 373 bad (relocated) sectors is pretty serious.

Good luck!
Gene

I suggested chkdsk /r but if under warranty I'd just get a replacement.

I thought I'd run /r. My chkdsk /f results are on the previous page. You can see the two additional stages - verifying files and free space. It appears to report 0 bad sectors. CrystalDiskInfo reports 180 bad sectors (just checked again and it's up to 188). On the other hand, that's raw data, not sure if I'm supposed to somehow interpret it. Where do you get 373 from?