Is this sign of hdd failure?

[gendome]

Sorry if it's in the wrong section but i need your opinion and views.please and thanks
okay recently my laptop is displaying the following signs:
-playing music using windows media player, it stutters every 2s
- i cannot open multiple program without lagging( most i do is open 2 browsers( Palemoon and Internet Explorer)
- in the last 2 week i had 2 BSOD 1st is 5 days ago and the 2nd is last night.
- cpu spikes up from 20% to 90% for 10s then jumps back down even tho i did not open any new programs.

i used auslogic disk doctor to checked it for the 1st bsod and also windows startup repair, i defrag, clean and wipe my hdd. i realise wiping the hdd took 4 hours longer than average disk wiping( twice a month i disk wipe). there is no weird sound coming from my hdd so im guessing it's not physical problem. however i been using my laptop for 2 years with no BSOD until last week where i downloaded gimp 2.0 program. i uninstalled it the same day after finding it wasnt the type of program i wanted to use lol. so any thoughts what is happening to my laptop? if it helps here are the specs:

Asus A52jr, i3-350m, 4gb ram, ati 5470, seagate 5400rpm 500gb.

and once a week i virus scan using security essentials and no virueses found.

thanks a lot for your time 😀

 

[nukemaster]

The new drive should be faster then the old one and also have slightly better access times(still behind desktop drives, but that is to be expected. Still laptop drives have become so much better in recent years).

If you use such a small portion of the drive and are on windows Vista/7/8. you can actually shrink the drive partition so that ALL data is on the fastest part of the drive. This improves access times and keeps you at in the fastest zone on the drive.

You can always extend the partition if you need the space in the future too.

A well DE-fragmented drive will also keep data in the fastest section of the drive too, this just ensures it has no place to go.

I guess you just have to wait for the diagnosis to be done now.

 

[gendome]

well its gonna take a week according to the guy in shop and for me i always defrag hdd once a week, twice a month wipe it, clear out all temp files but i heard defragging hdd will somehow shorten it lifespan( not a lot just a teeny tiny bit) because it has to spin more or something?

 

[nukemaster]

Defrag does not hurt a hard drive at all. The drive spins the same even at idle.

That said, don't defrag a SSD. that can hurt it.

Defrag every week or 2 may be too much, but it depends on your use.

All that defrag does is pull all the little bits of file together. When the drive writes, sometimes it breaks the file into many parts(either because is is doing other things or does not have a section with room for the full life and countless other reasons).

By wipe it you just mean clear extra files or actually reinstall windows? If reinstall windows, that must be a pain.

 

[gendome]

wipe is clear extra files using ccleaner

 

[nukemaster]

no harm in that.

 

[gendome]

the shop said my hdd confirm dying so now im torn between either the 1tb WD hdd or a kingston 120gb ssd( dont know exact model). what benefits do i actually get from a ssd?I'm concern with the reliability, lifespan, heat and power should be lower than hdd i heard and since i torrent(not large files at once, 30gb at most) and i read that torrenting on ssd will kill it faster?? what i mainly do on my laptop is
-web browsing and simple web games
- light gaming such as l4d2, torchlight and bf2
- watch movies(from external hdd)
-torrent series/movies( as mentioned above, 30gb max at one time, after that i wait it finish then i start new torrent)


because i noticed that i have a low space usage i really want to switch to a ssd for the performance gain. and what are things i SHOULD NOT do with a ssd, i know defragging is a big no no. and can i wipe, repair and repair registry if i use a ssd?

 

[nukemaster]

Each cell in an SSD has a limited number of write cycles.

Now it is important to know that an SSD will automatically perform what is called wear leveling, this allows the drive to use all the memory evenly. This greatly extends the like of the flash memory because it all has to wear down at once.

To make matters more interesting each cell does not just hold 1 bit of data(unless you get the REAL expensive ones). As such, when you write a small file a full cell has to be refreshed(even if the file does not fill the cell it self). Think of if a file just kept overwriting one section of the memory, it would run out of write cycles faster then spreading that wear over the full drive.

This is part of the reason why an SSD that is not taken care of can have lower performance. When a SSD writes it has to find FREE(empty) flash. This can be an issue if you have all the flash cells half filled(or closer to full). In that case the drive has to either combine half empty cells to make full ones and give you free ones or rewrite cells with your new data plus the old data.

Under Windows XP this was quite the issue, but with drives getting better and taking care of them selves in the background and with TRIM support in windows 7, SSD's do not have that much performance loss overtime.

Since a SSD works better with some free space, you will notice most sandforce(and others as well, but not all) drives are 120 and not 128 or 240 and not 256gigabytes. This extra space is a part of the smaller drive, but is just kept so the drive has some space space to manage free blocks. This also allows the controller to remap any failed cells over to this over provisioned area.

Some drives like OCZ's Synapse cache drive have 2x the flash memory(128gigs for a 64 gig drive) so they have enough space to never run out of free cells and even if 100% of the accessible space fails, the drives has enough extra to not fail. But those are for a different purpose.

The biggest thing with SSD's is to not write excessive date to the drive(but who does full drive benchmarks every day). Many users will disable the pagefile for windows and search indexing as well as many other activities that write to the drive often to reduce writes as well. The reason being that many systems have enough memory and search is very fast on a SSD anyway.

I just slapped an old Kingston V100 64 gig on windows 8 and did nothing fancy to it. lets see how long it lasts

Want more info?
http/www.tomshardware.com/forum/270102-32-useful-articles-part

 

[gendome]

Each cell in an SSD has a limited number of write cycles.

Now it is important to know that an SSD will automatically perform what is called wear leveling, this allows the drive to use all the memory evenly. This greatly extends the like of the flash memory because it all has to wear down at once.

To make matters more interesting each cell does not just hold 1 bit of data(unless you get the REAL expensive ones). As such, when you write a small file a full cell has to be refreshed(even if the file does not fill the cell it self). Think of if a file just kept overwriting one section of the memory, it would run out of write cycles faster then spreading that wear over the full drive.

This is part of the reason why an SSD that is not taken care of can have lower performance. When a SSD writes it has to find FREE(empty) flash. This can be an issue if you have all the flash cells half filled(or closer to full). In that case the drive has to either combine half empty cells to make full ones and give you free ones or rewrite cells with your new data plus the old data.

Under Windows XP this was quite the issue, but with drives getting better and taking care of them selves in the background and with TRIM support in windows 7, SSD's do not have that much performance loss overtime.


Since a SSD works better with some free space, you will notice most sandforce(and others as well, but not all) drives are 120 and not 128 or 240 and not 256gigabytes. This extra space is a part of the smaller drive, but is just kept so the drive has some space space to manage free blocks. This also allows the controller to remap any failed cells over to this over provisioned area.

Some drives like OCZ's Synapse cache drive have 2x the flash memory(128gigs for a 64 gig drive) so they have enough space to never run out of free cells and even if 100% of the accessible space fails, the drives has enough extra to not fail. But those are for a different purpose.

The biggest thing with SSD's is to not write excessive date to the drive(but who does full drive benchmarks every day). Many users will disable the pagefile for windows and search indexing as well as many other activities that write to the drive often to reduce writes as well. The reason being that many systems have enough memory and search is very fast on a SSD anyway.

I just slapped an old Kingston V100 64 gig on windows 8 and did nothing fancy to it. lets see how long it lasts

Want more info?
http/www.tomshardware.com/forum/270102-32-useful-articles-part

so if i heard you correctly, there is actually more space on the 120gb ssd, except it cant be used by us but it serve as a space for it to remap the failed cells of the 120gb that can be used by me? kinda like giving it a space to stretch a bit. i also know if you use ssd, it best to enable TRIM, disable hibernation by deleting the file and disable the paging file feature

 

[nukemaster]

Yeah that would cover it. that extra space also helps the drive not run out of free cells as well.

Despite lets say a M4 drive having all of its flash accessible, some reviews show it reacting better when partially full(the drive is fairy good at self cleaning). But at the end of the day, with Trim(Windows 7 should auto enable TRIM) and any system having some idle time. SSD performance is very stable for most users.

Another option if you DID need more space would be a hybrid drive like the ones Seagate offers. It will get similar speed to SSD's for the most used stuff(up to 8gigaytes, 4 when they first came out) while having more space.

http/www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/laptop-hard-drives/momentus-xt-hybrid/

So many options

 

[gendome]

Yeah that would cover it. that extra space also helps the drive not run out of free cells as well.

Despite lets say a M4 drive having all of its flash accessible, some reviews show it reacting better when partially full(the drive is fairy good at self cleaning). But at the end of the day, with Trim(Windows 7 should auto enable TRIM) and any system having some idle time. SSD performance is very stable for most users.

Another option if you DID need more space would be a hybrid drive like the ones Seagate offers. It will get similar speed to SSD's for the most used stuff(up to 8gigaytes, 4 when they first came out) while having more space.

http/www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/laptop-hard-drives/momentus-xt-hybrid/

So many options

yea but sadly the choices are EXTREMELY limited in my place T_T . ordering online is out of question already so have to rely on what i can find here. well i think im going to go for ssd, and use torrent on family laptop then store everything on external hdd. thanks for all your help so far. 😀

 

[gendome]

Best answer selected by gendome.

 

[nukemaster]

Externals for storage are a great idea(due to the lack of extra space in laptops for more drives).

Hope you enjoy the new speed

If you are having a shop put that in, request they ensure it has the latest firmware installed as well. This will ensure good performance and stability.

 

[gendome]

Externals for storage are a great idea(due to the lack of extra space in laptops for more drives).

Hope you enjoy the new speed

If you are having a shop put that in, request they ensure it has the latest firmware installed as well. This will ensure good performance and stability.

yeap will do and i think if i do need to torrent on my laptop, i can buy a 64gb sd card, put it in the laptop's card reader and set the torrent destination folder to there 😀

 

[nukemaster]

yeap will do and i think if i do need to torrent on my laptop, i can buy a 64gb sd card, put it in the laptop's card reader and set the torrent destination folder to there 😀

SD cards will also wear out after some time, but still cheaper then a new ssd

 

[gendome]

ok erm i know this thread is kinda dead but i just wanna ask, between corsair, kingston and crucial? whose ssd if best? i have the option to choose crucial now haha

 

[nukemaster]

Flash drives are only as good as the hardware inside.

You have 3 main types of memory(NAND)

Asyn - Value
Sync - Common
Toggle - Generally called best

You can normally tell by the price, but when in doubt, hit up reviews.

Most current Corsair and Kingston drives on the market are running a SandForce controller. This controller has gained lots of popularity due to its ability to compress data in real time resulting is VERY fast transfers(and longer drive life since less data is written). The down side is that non compressible(most digital music and videos as well as any compressed files like ZIP/RAR ect) data will write slower. Some will argue that more of the data we use is compressible.

This is worth a read.

http/www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-60gb-benchmark-review,3137.html

Now the crucial drive uses a Marvel controller so is a different drive all together. The performance can be called slower then SandForce on compressible data but faster on non compressible. The big thing for the M4 drives is more constant performance and very low access times. With no over provisioning(none that I know of) I do not know how the M4's will handle if cells start to fail down the line.

Reviews will always give you a better idea then I can because I have only tried out 2 SSD's Kingston V100 64gig(Windows 8) and a 128gig M4(Just games that I want to load faster.).