Hard drive suddenly became very slow?

I'm not sure what happened, but I have a PATA 160GB HD that was in a USB2 enclosure that was running fine, and then all of the sudden it became super-slow. I took it out of the enclosure and put at as my second IDE internal HD, deleted the partition, created one and formatted it but it's still extremely slow. I'm only getting 2MB/sec vs. 48MB/sec on my C: drive. It's not USB related, and it's not virus related. Is there anything I can do or is the drive toast? If it was bad sectors wouldn't making a new new partition and reformatting bypass the problem(s)? Any software you can recommend to "fix" this problem?

 

Welcome to MajorGeeks,

I would download this and see what it finds,

http://www.majorgeeks.com/DiskCheckup_d3464.html

 

Thanks, I tried that software and got OK in all of the columns. The numbers weren't so different from my C: drive. Any other thoughts?

 

The drive had bad tracks which caused Windows to fall back to PIO mode of the IDE controller. I could not set it back to DMA. So I ran Seagate's repair utility which reallocated the bad sectors and then uninstalled and reinstalled the drive which caused Windows to evaluate it again, and since it was back to 100% it went back to DMA 5 which was fast again.

 

Good find and Thanks for posting back, that should be a great help to any others.