HDD 100%, no fixes found, most likely not a faulty HDD - Storage

HDD 100%, no fixes found, most likely not a faulty HDD - Storage

tomshardware.com

Jun 7, 2017 9:44 AM

Apparently this is a common issue with HDDs and Windows 10/8/8.1, but I hadn't heard of it before it happened to me. Sadly, my case doesn't seem to be so common.

Here's what's happened so far:
I bought a Lenovo 310-15IKB exactly 2 months ago from an online retailer, which, sadly, isn't based in my country, so it would take a lot of time to send it back to them and that's why I want to be absolutely sure I have no other options left.

I had some minor issues with Windows Update when setting it up for the first time, but I ended up just downloading the latest image of Windows and installing from that instead. All seemed fine. I was mostly preparing the laptop for studying and I didn't use it much, but then one day I decided to see how it works, play around with it a bit and so on. And it was unbearably slow. My brand new Core i7 with 8GB of 2133MHz RAM was as slow as my old single core Celeron netbook with 1GB of RAM. (Yes, I had one of those and it was a gift, don't judge me.) So I popped the Task Manager open and saw the 100% HDD. "Okay, something f*cked up, let's fix it."

Well, it has been almost a month and I've done anything and everything I found as a possible "fix" - Superfetch, Windows Search, BITS, Virtual Memory, Windows Defender Cloud, then replacing Windows Defender completely, Google Chrome settings, reinstalled Windows once from the same DVD, then repaired from a newly made USB to make sure. The HDD did fail Short and Long DST in SeaTools (it is a ST1000LM035-1RK172), but doing a Long Fix All in SeaTools for DOS fixed that completely, although it didn't affect performance. I've turned off notifications in Windows, Telemetry, turned off writing cache to the disk even. I cloned the HDD to a spare I've got (I am not sure it's in a great condition either, but I had to test it) and booted from it - even slower and still at 100%. Updated drivers for everything manually and updated using Lenovo's utility. There's probably even more things that I've done which I can't remember right now.

The laptop boots slowly into both Ubuntu and Windows (I installed Ubuntu a lot later, so it shouldn't be a problem with dual booting), but it doesn't show high percentages in NMON for disc utilization in Ubuntu, although it spikes very hard (50%+) every time any reading is done on the disk. It can sometimes calm down in Windows as well, but also spikes very hard (90-100%) when anything is read from the disk (just opening a folder can take up to 20-30 seconds). CrystalDisk Mark shows some very weird results - when plugged into my PC as a secondary HDD and when it is in my laptop and Windows is booted from it. I don't have an enclosure to test the drive as secondary in my laptop.

I'm already planning on replacing the HDD with an SSD, but I fear that the laptop might have a hardware issue not in the HDD (I'm thinking Mobo?). I've only tested the laptop with Lenovo's online diagnostics, except for the HDD (SeaTools for Windows, SeaTools for DOS, CrystalDisk Info, HDTune, dskchk, diskcheck through Ubuntu, etc.), so I wouldn't mind doing that if you have any suggestions for tools that might find the problem.