Low performance of my 3T harddrive

Question

I have a 3TB seagate protable hard drive (SATA), but this hard drive suddenly has really low performance. I guess there are some bad blocks in the hard drive.

So I have done this test:

Plugin the hard drive directly into a desktop.
Run Ubuntu 14.04 from a bootable usd stick.
Create a partition of 100 MB and formatted into ext2.

sudo mkfs.ext2 -c -c /dev/sdc1

Test the performance of the new partition.

sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdc1

However, the performance is really low for this partition and unstable.

/dev/sdc1 Timing buffered disk reads: 2 MB in 15.86 seconds = 129.16 kB/sec

What should I do to improve the performance of my hard drive?

Thanks for any suggestions.

First off, if you suspect the drive is failing, check the SMART status. — SlightlyCuban, Dec 30 '14 at 20:43
@SlightlyCuban Thanks for your reply. The SMART test shows there is a bad sector. I will try to contact seller for replacement. — Bangyou, Dec 31 '14 at 04:08
@psusi I disassemble my probable hard drive and directly plugin the disk into my desktop. — Bangyou, Dec 31 '14 at 04:09

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:23

Odds are you're having read errors due to a failing disk. Before anything else, back up your data and get ready to replace the drive.

That said, if you want to get some use out of this drive, you could use badblocks to force the drive to replace the bad sectors with spare ones:

sudo badblocks -wsv /dev/sdc

Or if you want to keep the data on the drive, use a non-destructive test as described in this answer:

sudo badblocks -nsv /dev/sdc

Note: both badblocks and using fsck -vcck will stress a drive and can make a bad drive die faster. Do not rely on this for data recovery. But if you want to get some extra use out of a drive you were going to throw away, give this a shot.

Low performance of my 3T harddrive

1 Answers1