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PC performance has suddenly started acting like it's bottlenecked

darleysamdarleysam On my way toUKRegistered User regular
edited May 2016 in Moe's Stupid Technology Tavern
So I built the PC I'm using late last year, it's an i7-4790K, 16gb RAM, Windows 10 on a 446gb SSD and a 2.7TB HDD. I almost exclusively use this for recording and editing let's plays, so I run Premiere from the SSD while keeping all the video, audio, and project files on the HDD. This has performed absolutely fine up until the last couple of days, when Premiere's performance seems to have become really erratic. When resuming a project, it takes forever to load the timeline correctly, and if I'm scrubbing through anything or jumping to a different point, where it would normally take a couple of seconds to catch up, now it's taking many times longer to do the same. Also if I'm previewing the timeline, the sound will often cut out after a few seconds.
I spent last night running virus scans to see if I'd picked up something, but that came up empty. I don't know the best way to check what kind of performance dips I'm getting, so I've no idea how to proceed in diagonsing this one.

edit: if I had to take a wild guess, I'd want to say that it feels like my HDD is acting up. I've no idea what could be causing that, whether it's physical or software, though.

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darleysam on

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  • Bendery It Like BeckhamBendery It Like Beckham Hopeless Registered User regular
    use Procmon and Process explorer to monitor things with high resource usage on your computer, process explorer will let you see what is using your disk, procmon will let you see what it is and if it's doing writes/reads etc.

    https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processmonitor.aspx
    https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processexplorer.aspx

  • darleysamdarleysam On my way to UKRegistered User regular
    Done, but I've no idea how to use these! I can say, I've tried just opening some of the video files in windows media player, and again where normally they'd open pretty quickly, it's now taking a lot longer and like in Premiere, skipping to different parts takes ages for it to catch up. It's not visibly affecting the running of my PC, it's not hanging as a whole when it happens, it's just whatever program seems to be trying to access things from my HDD that suffers.

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  • darleysamdarleysam On my way to UKRegistered User regular
    An addition, I downloaded HD Sentinel after some googling, to check the status of my drive. If it's to be believed, I'm a couple of days away from a drive failure, and that's kind of not good news.

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  • Bendery It Like BeckhamBendery It Like Beckham Hopeless Registered User regular
    Buy a new hard drive then just clone it with Raw Copy.

    http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=22

  • Bendery It Like BeckhamBendery It Like Beckham Hopeless Registered User regular
    The above tools would allow you to grab the process that is taking up the most system resources by PID, then see what open handles the process has and all the requests it's making on the system. It's good when you've got something taking up say 90% disk usage all the time for no reason (I'm looking at you Windows updates)

  • darleysamdarleysam On my way to UKRegistered User regular
    Yeah, I'm quickly trying to backup some of the most aggravating stuff to lose just in case. It's weird, Seagate's own health check tools don't seem to report any problems, which has me wondering if this program's picking up some false information somewhere. Like, it's been having what seems like extended seek times, but I guess I figured that if it's that close to death it'd seem a bit more... sickly.

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  • ShadowfireShadowfire Vermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered User regular
    Open up Event Viewer in Windows, go to the Windows logs and hit System. If you see anything in there that list Disk or NTFS as either a warning or error, I'd consider that confirmation of HD Sentinel's warning. Even if not, I'd probably trust it enough to continue doing a backup.

    PSN: Bradcopter | Steam: Shadowfire
    https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
  • darleysamdarleysam On my way to UKRegistered User regular
    Yeah there's a run of about 26 bad blocks listed by Disk, all of them two days ago. About when I started noticing problems.

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  • ShadowfireShadowfire Vermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered User regular
    Yeah, definitely back it up if you haven't already and get a new drive in there. You can clone it, that's fine, but back up your data first.

    And don't buy a Seagate drive.

    PSN: Bradcopter | Steam: Shadowfire
    https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
  • LD50LD50 Registered User regular
    Shadowfire wrote: »
    Yeah, definitely back it up if you haven't already and get a new drive in there. You can clone it, that's fine, but back up your data first.

    And don't buy a Seagate drive.

    Or do. Buy whatever has ok reviews and is cheap. All brands have hard drive failures, and all drives will fail eventually.

  • darleysamdarleysam On my way to UKRegistered User regular
    Mum, dad stop fighting!!

    Yeah I'll order a new internal drive and an external for backing up. I do hope that turns out to be the problem!

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