Troubleshooting drive performance

[mracicot]

Situation:

I purchased HDS Pro to see why a particular drive seems to hang during copy operations. The drive is relatively new and has been working well for over a year.

I did a surface test and HDS reported no problems, 100% health. I then initiated a copy of a bunch of files. After Windows (Win10) analyzed the source files to determine number and amount of data, I got 0% through the file copy when it hung... It went from over 400bytes/sec to zero in about 10 seconds, which is faster than most of the other failures I've seen, but not the fastest. I clicked on the HDS window and it was unresponsive; Windows gave me the option to terminate the program or wait until it responded. so I chose to wait. I left it that way and about 40 minutes later, the HDS window became responsive. It still says there are no problems, but the copy operation - which was still in the background and reporting 0bytes/sec - is still not copying data. Clicking the "X" to close the copy window has in the past not done anything and in this case that's true, too...other than changing the title bar to read "canceling - 0% complete".

SO: How can I otherwise use HDS to figure out why the copy operation is stalling like this? If not HDS, what other recommendations does anyone have?

TIA!

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for your message.
I can confirm Hard Disk Sentinel is the best solution to diagnose this and similar issues.

First of all, is it a 2.5" external USB hard disk?

It is relatively common that such hard disks can't get enough power for proper operation.
For some time (for some smaller file transfers) and/or during sequential disk test, usually they may work fine - but a more complicated operation (for example many seek operations performed while Windows calculates the total amount of data) the drive may stops working.

If this happens, it is completely normal that any software trying to access it need to wait for the response of the hardware - which may never happen (or just after very long time). This is why during that period Hard Disk Sentinel seems "frozen" and also the copy operation did not advance.

Usually, especially if the disk seems 100% perfect and the test confirms that the total disk area is readable, this is not really related to the hard disk itself, but caused by something else, for example the power source, cable, connection or similar. Sometimes firmware upgrade of the external enclosure is required, personally just encountered this with 1.8" hard disks and their USB 3.0 enclosure: the drives could be written without problems but when wanted to read back, similar happened.

So if this is a 2.5" USB hard disk, I'd recommend to try with double Y USB cable which provides enough power as it gets from two USB connectors.
This page:
http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_case_spin_retry.php
describes a slightly different (more common) situation and how to avoid it by an Y cable.

I recommend to use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option when the drive is working.
This way it is possible to check its complete status, verify the connection type and that may help to find out more, for example if a driver/firmware update may help in this situation.
(especially if the drive is not powered from USB connection, eg. it is an internal hard disk).