Hey everyone! I've had my MSI Z390 Gaming Trident X Plus for about 5 years, and it has generally run smoothly until recently. Lately, my D drive has started acting up—game downloads take forever, sometimes failing altogether. For instance, trying to install Dead by Daylight from Steam was a nightmare; it fluctuated between high speeds and dropping to zero, ultimately leading to an error about corrupt update files. I resorted to installing it on my C drive, which worked without issues. League of Legends had similar problems, where it wouldn't install or would take an unreal amount of time, and when I finally got it to launch, it still showed errors. I've also noticed that video captures via the NVIDIA app occasionally come out corrupted. I've done a bunch of troubleshooting already, including running chkdsk, checking for errors through properties, and updating drivers. I'm considering wiping the D drive since there's nothing important on it. I did uninstall Norton 2 months ago due to it being resource-hogging, but everything was fine for a month before these problems started. Any advice would be appreciated! I'm also contemplating upgrading to a 1TB SSD, since they're faster, but I'd like to see if I can save my HDD first.
2 Answers
You might want to consider a full format if you don’t have anything important on the drive, but keep in mind this should be a last resort. Before doing that, ensure you’ve scanned the drive thoroughly for errors. If formatting doesn’t solve the problem, it’s likely that your hard drive could be failing, and investing in an SSD might be worthwhile for the speed and reliability!
Formatting can help, but if you're already seeing signs of decline, an SSD might ultimately be the best solution for performance.
It sounds like your D drive might be on its last legs. Try running CrystalDiskInfo to check the SMART status. If it's showing caution, that generally indicates potential issues. The yellow bubbles usually mean that those specific values are outside normal ranges, which can lead to performance problems and data corruption. If crucial values like reallocated sectors or pending sectors are flagged, it's worth considering a replacement. Don’t forget to back up any recoverable data, just in case!
I ran it, and the health status was caution. I also noticed some indicators are yellow, should I be concerned about those?
Thanks for the insight! I'll definitely check those values after I run CrystalDiskInfo.
Formatting is something I’m open to trying. I just want to make sure it's worth it before taking that step.