Crystal Disk Info Virus
Macabeo Eastman
Unfortunately its been far to long since I post a PC Tools Weekly,for that I apologize. We kick things right off with another one of my favorite apps and that's CrystalDiskInfo which is a utility app that gets a gauge of the entire operation of your hard drive.
Failing hard drives are very hard to diagnose,often times when your computer is running at a snails pace,or you find applications crashing at random,first thought is as always is it virus or malware compromising my system.
There are plenty of apps that can pinpoint whether or not is your drive is failing,but what I always use,even until this day is CrystalDiskinfo. How CrystalDiskinfo operates is simple,it gives you a complete reading of your computers SMART information (self-monitoring-analysis and report technology) as well as the current temperature and health status within your hard drive. The applications dashboard gives users the long list of up-to-date system data. This is so that you the user can visually see if the operation of your hard drive is going well.
I have an XPS 8500, with Windows 10, 24 gigs of RAM and the 1 tb hard drive that came from Dell. Lately, the boot is getting slower and slower. It now takes over 5 minutes from power on to a useable PC. I've noticed that the hard drive indicator light is on continuously the whole time.
I was planning on enabling a boot log file to see what's happening, but I'm not even sure what to look for. Any hints? I've been warned away from the Registry cleaning tools, but what do others think?
Then reboot and immediately press F12. Look for the option to run the diagnostics on that menu. Run all of them including RAM and extended hard drive tests. Copy error message(s), if any...
In rare cases, I've seen SMART barely keeping files integrity ... 99% and even 100% ... even on BAD / FAILING drives. The initial obvious symptom is that the system is very slow to boot and execute programs from disk.
I followed your steps explicitly. I set the Virtual Memory Initial Size at 3,500 and the Maximum Size at 4,000 (I have 24 gigs on the motherboard). Programs now run significantly faster. My personal benchmark is Windows Spider Solitaire: now, you can't see the cards being dealt - they just appear. But, the steps didn't do much for the boot time. What do you think about a SSD as the boot drive, saving the HDD for data files?
The first thing Windows 10 does on startup is check for updates, even before you log on; then it dowloads and installs them. Finally, it performs some additional post-update maintenance tasks. When it's done, some 15 minutes later, you realize that Search Indexer is still running; or SysMain (ex-Superfetch); or some Application Experience script; or other Telemetry-related tasks. It turns out that tasks that intensively use the hard drive can slow the system down. The reason I found this slowdown really annoying is because any video game (or any application, for that matter) that I tried to launch shortly after startup would run in slow motion. For example, try launching Windows Explorer after Disk Defragmenter has been running for about 5 minutes or so, you'll see what I mean. Both you and I have PCs with hard drives, not SSDs. I don't know if a similar problem is apparent with SSDs, probably not.
Anyway, the "fix" that I found includes preventing all of the above. The most important step is to postpone updates, including update downloads. If you have Win 10 Pro then it's straightforward; for Home, you may wish to look up 'Group Policy Editor in Windows 10 Home Edition Enabler', then run the script with admin privileges. In any case, you need to launch gpedit.msc, then go to Local Computer Policy Computer Configuration Administrative Templates Windows Components Windows Update. There are 2 setting to edit here: Firstly, open 'Configure Automatic Updates' and select option '2 - Notify for download and auto install'; click OK. Secondly, double-click "folder" 'Windows Update for Business' and open 'Select when Preview Builds and Feature Updates are received'; select ''Semi-Annual Channel' and click OK. From now on, you will install updates manually by visiting Windows Update in Settings.
Last but not least, you may wish to disable the three Application Experience-related tasks in Task Scheduler, as well as services Windows Search and SysMain. OOSU10 can help turn off some unwanted "communication channels" between your PC and Microsoft.
I replaced my original SATA drive on my XPS 8500 with a Samsung 250GB SSD. I used the Samsung utility that moved the OS and boot stuff to the SSD. Since that day my boot time has been 5-9 minutes. I recently did a fresh install to Windows 10 for a clean install on the SSD. Boot time dropped to 5-6 minutes.
There is a list of things to try at this link: -boot-time-windows-10-ssd/ but I do not recommend turning on Fast Startup. Also try disabling your anti-virus software if you are using a 3rd party program. Once booted up, is you computer also running slow or is it just very slow booting up?
I have bought a Hitachi UltraStar 7K3000, a 3 TB internal drive. It was sold not in the box but in some kind of plastic parcel that was closed. Manufactured in Thailand, March 2012 - so it's 6 years old.
The most reliable way is to look at the SMART values, using whatever tool you prefer for your platform. SMART values include Power_On_Hours, which should tell you if the disk is used or not. It will also tell you a lot about the health of the disk.
Any company being able to tinker with those values will also be able to remove any other traces of refurbishing. So in that case, it's pretty hopeless, but such an amount of energy is usually not spent to dupe customers.
You could also try to use forensic tools on the harddisk, to reveal if there was any content on it . Something like sleuthkit or the testdisk tool seems like a good place to start. (Edit: I meant the testdisk not the file tool, sorry)
Some of these comments are wrong. It's 2023, from what I read in customer hard drive reviews for Amazon, sellers are able to reset the hours count back to zero even when there are damages to the outer hard drive meaning it's used. Some are reporting suspiciously low hours on the drive. The most alarming evidence is how many of the reviews report drives failing after a few months or even DOA. They are sending them out in antistatic bags, and most being sold are server pulls.
You have to do extended SMART tests on them and keep them powered on for 24 hours to weed out obvious failures. And bad blocks or reallocated means to take caution not always that it's going to fail immediately unless the count keeps climbing, crytaldiskinfo tells you, but I'm no expert, do more research
From what I can understand from cursory Google searching, this message can maybe sometimes come from outdated drivers or BIOS but, if not, could also be a sign of imminent disk failure. It was coming up multiple times a day a few weeks ago, but then I installed a system update and it didn't come up again at all for multiple weeks. Then it started coming up again for a day, I did another system update, and it stopped again. Popped up once more today, with no system update available.
and when I did Get Started on driver identification, it says they are all updated. I didn't know what form of Intel Optane Memory I had, and the instructions I found on Google said to navigate to this pane of Memory and Storage Management:
As n_scott_pearson mentioned, this could be a sign of the drive being about to fail, but something to keep in mind is that our Intel Optane Memory and Storage Management is not an SSD diagnostics tool, so you can follow the recommendations he has provided to confirm if there are any problems with the SSDs, or you may use the tools from your SSD manufacturer (even contact them) if you consider it necessary.
Now, regarding the screenshots you have shared and the alert itself, it is possible this error is related to the system not having valid disk pairs, and it reports it as a problem with one of the disks, meaning it is purely informational and not an actual problem since the "Manage" tab does not display any SMART events or alerts, and this has been reported in the past, see link below:
My additional recommendation besides checking the SSD health would be to simply disable the notifications form the Optane software if you do not have an Optane Memory and also if you do not use any of the RAID functionalities of the tool:
First of all, what this means. It means that a SSD/HDD/SSHD device is signalling its imminent failure. Your normal response to this message would be to replace this device before it fails completely (and its contents lost). For more information, here's a good place to start: -Monitoring,_Analysis_and_Reporting_Technology.
Now, while it's true that spurious notifications do happen, this is not something that happens very often. Most times, it is a true indication of a drives' imminent failure. If you want to be absolutely sure before replacing the drive, there are all sorts of tools available that you can use to verify the state. My favorites are AIDA64 (trialware; ), CrystalDiskInfo (donationware; ) and Passmark's DiskCheckup (free for personal use; ).
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