BB
04-24-2014, 10:38 AM
After a long saga of trying to diagnose a problem with my PC I'm 98% sure I need to replace my main hard drive, so I'm scouting for recommendations as to where to put my money.
I'm prioritising price and build quality over volume. My current drive is 250GB and I'm using about 150GBs of that so I don't need anything tremendous- If I can get a sturdy-brand 500GB for the same price as a sketchy-brand 4TB drive, I'd prefer the sturdy build. Don't need SSD or anything fancy like that.
My current disk is coming up to 9 years old, bless it. It's worked like a trooper. :(
Any time I try to perform a reasonably large scale file operation- mainly installing programs but it's also done it with large zip files- my PC kind of... gums up. The best comparison I can come up with is it's like going into a shop and getting the "Hello sir how may I help you" spiel but once you put in your request, the assistant just keeps staring at you expectantly.
The installation freezes but ACTS like it's continuing on at a very slow pace (the flashy progress bar animation plays smoothly), other programs respond to my inputs, and so on. But if I try to do anything, like opening windows explorer or even fire up task manager, nothing at all happens. I don't get the hourglass, there's no stuttering or lag or anything else that usually happens if you're trying to do too much at once, it just... doesn't do anything.
During this, the disk activity light is permanently on, but I can hear the disk isn't actually doing anything. Task manager shows no unusual or high processor usage and there's nothing else that appears to be wrong... aside from the fact nothing is happening.
After about five minutes or so, suddenly everything comes unstuck and carries on like nothing happened, all the things I tried to open pop up at once and the installation finishes without complaint.
I have two drives, one of which I only use for installing steam games on. I haven't had any problems at all doing this- the second drive works fine. I tried to install a game on my main disk and the same thing happened. To test it further I burned a linux live CD and tried to install linux on a spare partition I'd already made on my main disk, and even out of Windows, the same problem occurred, which is why I think it's the hardware.
The weird thing is I've not had any difficulty with corrupted files. Once installed, the programs work perfectly well, and I can load and save my documents without issue. I have noticed with streaming content (music or video) there are weird skips where the audio will replay for a few seconds before carrying on as normal, but again there's no corruption and the file can play to the end. Obviously I anticipate this is temporary at best and it'll eventually start to decline, but for now at least I can USE the disk fine as long as I don't try to install or update anything.
As a further question, I plan to make a backup of all my files asap (I'm pretty good at keeping up with this so even if I don't manage to do it before the disk dies I won't lose a great deal) but I'm worrying that, if the same skipping that happens with video occurs while backing the disk up, the backup itself will be more corrupted than the original. Is there any program that can compare two versions of a stack of files and check to see if there's any differences between them?
I'm prioritising price and build quality over volume. My current drive is 250GB and I'm using about 150GBs of that so I don't need anything tremendous- If I can get a sturdy-brand 500GB for the same price as a sketchy-brand 4TB drive, I'd prefer the sturdy build. Don't need SSD or anything fancy like that.
My current disk is coming up to 9 years old, bless it. It's worked like a trooper. :(
Any time I try to perform a reasonably large scale file operation- mainly installing programs but it's also done it with large zip files- my PC kind of... gums up. The best comparison I can come up with is it's like going into a shop and getting the "Hello sir how may I help you" spiel but once you put in your request, the assistant just keeps staring at you expectantly.
The installation freezes but ACTS like it's continuing on at a very slow pace (the flashy progress bar animation plays smoothly), other programs respond to my inputs, and so on. But if I try to do anything, like opening windows explorer or even fire up task manager, nothing at all happens. I don't get the hourglass, there's no stuttering or lag or anything else that usually happens if you're trying to do too much at once, it just... doesn't do anything.
During this, the disk activity light is permanently on, but I can hear the disk isn't actually doing anything. Task manager shows no unusual or high processor usage and there's nothing else that appears to be wrong... aside from the fact nothing is happening.
After about five minutes or so, suddenly everything comes unstuck and carries on like nothing happened, all the things I tried to open pop up at once and the installation finishes without complaint.
I have two drives, one of which I only use for installing steam games on. I haven't had any problems at all doing this- the second drive works fine. I tried to install a game on my main disk and the same thing happened. To test it further I burned a linux live CD and tried to install linux on a spare partition I'd already made on my main disk, and even out of Windows, the same problem occurred, which is why I think it's the hardware.
The weird thing is I've not had any difficulty with corrupted files. Once installed, the programs work perfectly well, and I can load and save my documents without issue. I have noticed with streaming content (music or video) there are weird skips where the audio will replay for a few seconds before carrying on as normal, but again there's no corruption and the file can play to the end. Obviously I anticipate this is temporary at best and it'll eventually start to decline, but for now at least I can USE the disk fine as long as I don't try to install or update anything.
As a further question, I plan to make a backup of all my files asap (I'm pretty good at keeping up with this so even if I don't manage to do it before the disk dies I won't lose a great deal) but I'm worrying that, if the same skipping that happens with video occurs while backing the disk up, the backup itself will be more corrupted than the original. Is there any program that can compare two versions of a stack of files and check to see if there's any differences between them?