Slow hard drive, but SMART looks OK

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Haole Boy

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Aloha. I have a hard drive from a customer machine that is running very slowly. Customer wants to save all the pictures on the drive, but also keep costs reasonable (I know, that's an oxymoron...). So, I'm trying to determine if I should try to run ddrescue, or ship it off to a professional drive recovery service. What has me somewhat confused is that the SMART parameters that I normally look at are all "good". Reallocated_Sector_Ct, Reallocated_Event_Count, Current_Pending_Sector, and Offline_Uncorrectable all have a RAW value of '0'.

But Raw_Read_Error_Rate has a RAW value of 19364. I've done some searching and found a couple of posts saying that you can ignore this number.

Also, Multi_Zone_Error_Rate has a RAW value of '65'. I'm not sure if I should be looking at the normalized values of 200 200 000.

The drive is a WD Caviar Green WDC WD10EADS-22M2B0

So... any advice on if I should try to recover with ddrescue, or send to the pros?

I'm attaching the full SMART output.

Mahalo,

Harry Z.smart_output.png
 
If slowness is the only complaint, I'd just back-up the user data with Fabs then clone it to a new drive and see if that solves the speed issue. If it has been failing to start up on occasion or is glacially slow, I'd suggest using ddrescue (otherwise I'd suggest using Acronis True Image (or your favorite cloning program) to clone it).
 
What is the temp like on the drive after it's been on for a while? I've seen this, very slow but no smart errors, and they are very hot. I'm with Larry, snag the customer data first then image to a new target and see what happens. When ever I have imaged a drive like this to a new target things go back to normal. Unless, of course, they have malware, LOL!!!!!
 
I'd say try DDrescue first since it's not making bad noises (I'm sure you would have mentioned that). If it will take too long, but doesn't hit bad sectors after around 2,000,000-3,000,000 sectors in (after it's cycled through all the heads, so we know it doesn't have a bad one, which could also cause the drive to run slow), then the problem is almost certainly firmware corruption and easily recoverable with the right tools (the high-end data recovery ones).
 
Larry Sabo said:
If slowness is the only complaint, I'd just back-up the user data with Fabs then clone it to a new drive and see if that solves the speed issue. If it has been failing to start up on occasion or is glacially slow, I'd suggest using ddrescue (otherwise I'd suggest using Acronis True Image (or your favorite cloning program) to clone it).
Click to expand...
+1 on the Fab's backup. But do from your own bench machine or from PE disk.
 
Hard Disk Sentinel is a fantastic program for testing drives.

But I would also boot to a minimal environment and run Crystal Benchmark (after data is saved) and compare the results with published ranges for the drive.

I've seen drives like this before, the one I can clearly recall was a WD, it ran so slow yet it showed 100%. Cloned to new drive and system was snappy again. I think I was getting like 10-20MB/s where it should have been able to do 100 without breaking a sweat.

Backup data + replace.
 
Clone the drive now.

IIRC you've posted about a similar situation before.... so you can refer back to that thread but get a good clone first. Deploy that good clone back to a new drive, and send the customer off on their way.

Forget about SMART testing..... SMART tests are basically worthless. I've seen plenty of drives that SMART though were just fine, but were junko.
 
Thank you all for your replies. I've decided to try to capture the user's data first with Fab's and then a disk imaging program. It's taken Fab's 30 minutes to scan the directories on the drive and copying has (finally) commenced.

This decision of which one to do first (capture user's data first or ddrescue/cloning) is always something of a quandry for me. And I've never seen this slow drive with no SMART errors symptom before. Again, thanx for all your input
 
Markverhyden said:
What is the temp like on the drive after it's been on for a while? I've seen this, very slow but no smart errors, and they are very hot. I'm with Larry, snag the customer data first then image to a new target and see what happens. When ever I have imaged a drive like this to a new target things go back to normal. Unless, of course, they have malware, LOL!!!!!
Click to expand...

Drive is slightly warmer than room temp.
 
True about SMART, I've seen drives that should have triggered a SMART Imminent Failure but never did. SMART is not something to depend on.

For example, I've seen drives with 100% SMART then doing a surface verify suddenly I have thousands of pending sectors.
 
So it's about a year and a bit old (runtime) by the looks of it. Might be under warranty. Keep in mind the power on hours reflects time the drive is used, not actual age.
 
Haole Boy said:
It's taken Fab's 30 minutes to scan the directories on the drive and copying has (finally) commenced.
Click to expand...
Yikes! :eek: I would have abandoned the back-up right there, as it portends great difficulty reading the actual data. Time for ddrescue/hddsuperclone, or a data recovery pro if the data is really important to the customer.
 
Last edited:
After I've imaged off a suspect drive I like to run it through HDD Regenerator and let it tell me how many delays, bad sectors, re-allocated sectors, etc. the drive has before I decide to continue with that drive. At least every sector gets checked and it beats on the drive a bit so if things are going to happen I want them to happen now.
 
lcoughey said:
Personally, I'd always go with ddrescue or hddsuperclone first on a drive of questionable condition. If you assume the best and encounter the worst, you risk making is worse. Yet, if your assume the worst and encounter the best, you will have a fast clean clone of the drive.
Click to expand...
Always clone first. Even if you get a bad clone you may get enough of it to rescue data from the clone. Which will be far less stressful (on you and the bad drive.)
 
Also it isn't clear from your post(or I missed it) that you pulled the drive and put it on a dedicated data recovery box. The drive might be fine, the bus connected to it might be the problem. I'd hate to spend time on a drive only to discover the mobo is bad.
 
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