This note is dedicated to all hard drive users who are not giving up their positions.
After 1.5 years of using the HP Pavilion laptop in dualboot HDD (Windows 10) and SSD (Ubuntu), I began to notice very long loading of applications, general unresponsiveness of the interface, freezing on the simplest operations in Windows 10. The problem was minimized to the extent that it became possible to use the laptop again. Below I will describe the actions that I took to eliminate the problem.
Diagnostics
To begin the study, we need to eliminate any kind of mystification, first we will determine the main reasons for hard drive failures. What can go wrong when working with a hard drive? Problems can arise at the physical level of electronics and at the logical, software level of data.
Electronics problems include things like: a non-working computer/laptop power supply, problems with the laptop battery; wear and tear of hard drive components, problems with the circuits and chips of the internal components of the drive, software errors in the firmware, consequences of impacts/falls of the drive, or similar problems with other devices that affect its operation.
Critical wear of a hard drive is considered to be the moment when a number of bad sectors (bad block) appears, at which further operation of the drive is impossible. These blocks are blocked by the firmware of the hard drive, the data is transferred to other sectors automatically and should not affect the operation of the drive until a certain critical moment.
Software logic problems include errors in the file system due to incorrect operation of applications, user actions: hot-switching off the device, terminating recording processes without correctly stopping applications, errors in drivers, operating system services.
Without specialized electronic diagnostic tools, we can only check the correctness of the software level, electronic malfunctions may be detected in the process, which are usually eliminated by block repair (replacement of components/chips); Next, we will consider software diagnostic methods using diagnostic utilities. It is worth noting that all utilities should be launched on the system with maximum priority, since other applications can interfere with performance measurements, block the disk for reading/writing, which will lead to incorrect diagnostic results.
SMART
S.M.A.R.T. is a system for monitoring the state of data storage devices – HDD, SDD, eMMC, etc. Allows you to assess the wear of the device, view the number of bad blocks (bad block), and take further action based on the data. You can view SMART in different applications for working with disks, I prefer to use utilities from the manufacturer. For my Seagate hard drive, I used the SeaTools utility, for it the state was displayed as GOOD, that is, the disk firmware thinks that everything is fine.
Manufacturer Utilities
The disk manufacturer’s utilities provide tests to check its operation. SeaTools has several types of tests, you can use all of them to localize the problem. Quick and simple tests may not reveal any problems, so prefer long tests. In my case, only Long Test found errors.
Slowride
To check the correctness of reading, finding slow or dead blocks, I wrote the application slowride, it works on a very simple principle – it opens a block device descriptor, with the specified user settings, reads data from the entire device, with time measurements, and displays slow blocks. The program stops at the first error, in which case you will have to move on to more serious utilities for reading data, since it is not possible to read disk data using simple methods.
In my case, the entire disk was read correctly, with a small drop in speed – 90 MB/sec (5400 rpm) per second, in some areas of the disk. From which it could be concluded that I was dealing with a software problem.
Acoustic Analysis
This method does not apply to software diagnostic methods, but is quite important for troubleshooting. For example, with a partially working power supply, the hard drive may hang/freeze, making a loud click.
In my case, when working with a disk in Windows 10, I heard a loud crack familiar to all HDD owners of the disk head running back and forth when trying to do something in the operating system, but the sound was almost constant, this led me to think about too much disk fragmentation, disk overload with background services.
Fixing
No electronics problems were detected during software diagnostics, block-by-block reading of the entire disk was completed correctly, however SeaTools showed errors during the Long Test check.
Manufacturer Utilities
The disk manufacturer’s software, in addition to diagnostics, provides error correction procedures. In SeaTools, the Fix All button is responsible for this; after confirming your consent to potential data loss, the correction process will start. Did this fix help in my case? No, the disk continued to work just as loudly and slowly, but Long Test no longer showed errors.
CHKDSK
CHKSDK is a Microsoft utility for eliminating software errors for Windows file systems. Over time, such errors accumulate on the disk and can greatly interfere with work, including the inability to read / write any data at all. You can find instructions for using the utility on the Microsoft website, but I recommend using all possible flags to fix errors (at the time of writing this note, this is /r /b /f); You need to run the check with administrator rights through the Windows terminal (cmd), for the system partition it will take place during system boot, it can take a very long time, in my case it took 12 hours.
Did this fix help in my case? No.
Disk defragmentation
Working with data on the disk is carried out in blocks, large files are usually written in several blocks/fragments. Over time, many deleted files create empty blocks that are not adjacent, because of this, when writing files fill these voids, and the disk head has to physically overcome large distances. This problem is called fragmentation, and only hard drive users encounter it. At the time of several fixes, fragmentation of my hard drive was 41%, visually it looked like this:
That is, everything is bad. You can see fragmentation and defragment using the Defragger utility or the built-in defragmenter. You can also enable the “Optimize drives” service in Windows 10, set up defragmentation on a schedule in the control panel. Only HDD disks need defragmentation, it is not advisable to enable it for SSD disks, since this will lead to accelerated wear of the disk, apparently for this reason background defragmentation is disabled by default.
An alternative defragmentation option is also known – moving data to another disk, formatting the disk, and copying the data back. In this case, the data will be written to completely empty sectors, while maintaining the correct logical structure for the system to operate. This option is fraught with problems of resetting potentially critical metadata, which may not be moved during normal copying.
Disabling services
With the help of Mark Russinovich’s utility Process Monitor you can track the processes that load the hard drive with their business, it is enough to enable the IO Write/Read columns. After examining this column, I disabled the Xbox Game Bar service, the well-known background acceleration service Superfetch under the new name SysMain, through the services panel of the control panel. Superfetch should constantly analyze the applications that the user uses and speed up their launch by caching in RAM, in my case this led to background loading of the entire disk and the impossibility of work.
Cleaning the disk
I also removed old applications, unnecessary files, thus freeing up sectors for correct fragmentation, simplifying the work of the operating system, reducing the number of useless, heavy services and programs.
Result
What helped the most? A noticeable difference in performance was achieved after defragmenting the disk, spontaneous freezes were eliminated by disabling the Xbox and Superfetch services. Would these problems not have occurred if I had used an SSD? There would definitely have been no problems with slow operation due to fragmentation, problems with services would have had to be eliminated in any case, and software errors do not depend on the type of drive. In the near future, I plan to completely switch to SSD, but for now, “Long live pancakes, pancakes forever!”
Links
http://www.outsidethebox.ms/why-windows-8-defragments-your-ssd-and-how-you-can-avoid-this/
https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/The-Defrag-Show
https://www.seagate.com/ru/ru/support/downloads/seatools/
https://www.ccleaner.com/defraggler/download
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/chkdsk
https://gitlab.com/demensdeum/slowride/
