Undiagnosed Hard Drive Lag

[Gredival]

So when I built my new desktop I decided to harvest an unused former primary drive from before I switched to an SSD (10k RPM 300GB WD Raptor from 2009), and set it up as a secondary drive to host some music and some games that I don't want on my SSD but I figure would benefit from being on a faster disk.

I can read and write from the drive fine, but I notice frequent stuttering and lag originating from this drive. Particularly noticeable when playing music stored on the drive (tracks skip for 3-5 seconds) or playing a game that's installed on the drive (hangtime/stutter lag when loading files).

However no SMART errors detected, no bad sectors on ChkDsk. I am sure the drive is the issue because I cloned it onto another drive (a 250GB WD Caviar Black) and put it into the same SATA slot and the clone plays the games and music fine without these issues. The same music copied out of this drive onto my SSD and onto my media storage drive also plays back fine without an issue.

I don't really need the drive but I would like to figure out what exactly the problem with it is. Because it's not RMA eligible, WD just said "If diagnostics and SMART say the drive is fine we dunno. Back up ur data."

[Dantrag]

Sounds like it's on it's way out. Thing is almost 10 years old so I'm shocked it lived this long. Spinning disks can just go. I had 3 NAS drives all die at the same fucking time -_-;

[Niya]

There are problems SMART and checkdisk can't diagnose. You can try HDTune (the free edition is enough), run the error scan and the benchmark.
Error scan should find no issues, and on a healthy hard drive the benchmark should show a not too wavy transfer line and latencies within a similar range. If transfer speed goes down the drain and latencies skyrocket in some parts, the drive is close to death.

[Gredival]

Yeah...

Sounds like it's on it's way out. Thing is almost 10 years old so I'm shocked it lived this long. Spinning disks can just go. I had 3 NAS drives all die at the same fucking time -_-;

I actually probably only used it for 4 years, probably should have looked into an RMA when I switched to the SSD instead of letting it sit cold for another five years.