I/O error, system slowing to a crawl. Signs of a dying hard drive?

[tracerit]

Lately i've been getting an I/O error while using the computer. It seems to only happen when i play a video file. I can reproduce it 100% of the time. Could it be that that file is on a "bad sector" of the hard drive?

 

[vss1980]

I assume you mean a particular video file and not just any video file.
Probably could be bad data causing the problem. Have you used chkdsk /r or other diagnostic to check for bad sectors (warning, can take a while)?

HD Sentinel does a pretty decent job of interpreting the SMART data from a drive explaining which key items of information may be relevant - a shame there isn't a free version, but you can trial it to find out what you need.

 

[tracerit]

I assume you mean a particular video file and not just any video file.
Probably could be bad data causing the problem. Have you used chkdsk /r or other diagnostic to check for bad sectors (warning, can take a while)?

HD Sentinel does a pretty decent job of interpreting the SMART data from a drive explaining which key items of information may be relevant - a shame there isn't a free version, but you can trial it to find out what you need.

yeah it's a particular video file. i recall this happening a few months ago with another file. I just renamed it "DO NOT DELETE.mkv" so that part of the drive won't be written over by something else lol, not sure if that works or not.

when i find some time i'll try those two methods to check. thanks!

 

[vss1980]

yeah it's a particular video file. i recall this happening a few months ago with another file. I just renamed it "DO NOT DELETE.mkv" so that part of the drive won't be written over by something else lol, not sure if that works or not.

when i find some time i'll try those two methods to check. thanks!

Not a bad idea - I did something similar a while back with a drive and just partitioned around the area.

 

[Nothinman]

Basically any amount of bad sectors is enough to get me to backup the data on that drive and replace it because every drive now has a pool of reserve sectors that the firmware silently reallocates data to as the normal sectors go bad. Once you start seeing errors reported to the OS you've exhausted the spare pool.

Occasionally writing to the sectors will "fix" them but there's no telling how long it'll buy you. It could be a year or it could be a week, only time and use will tell.

There are a number of free Windows tools that will read the SMART data from a drive and give you an indication as to it's health, but even those are just giving you an opinion and you still have to make the final judgement.

 

[murphyc]

There are different kinds of bad sector recovery, so the bad sector's data isn't always automatically moved to a known good sector. Only during write is a persistently bad sector removed from use with certainty.

smartmontools should be used to do periodic extended (long) tests, which will show the first LBA with a read error. As soon as such errors appear the disk should be zero'd (or ideally ATA Secure Erased), which will cause persistent bad sectors to be removed (i.e. no corresponding LBA). The disk can then be used again, with vigilant SMART testing for additional errors. If it continues to be a recurring problem, I'd have it swapped out under warranty.