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I finally quit pulling drives to test them and started checking SMART first
Back when I was doing bench work at a shop in Reno around 2011, any time a machine came in acting slow or random freezing, first thing I did was pull the drive and slap it in an external dock to run a full scan. That meant cracking the case, unplugging stuff, and risking a customer's data on a drive that maybe just had a loose SATA cable. Took 45 minutes before I even knew anything. Now I just boot into a PE stick and pull the SMART data, look at reallocated sectors and the pending count, and I usually know in about 3 minutes if the drive is on its way out. If the numbers look clean I move on to memory and the event log instead of yanking hardware for no reason. Part of it was the tools got better, part of it was me eating a returned drive fee once because I broke a connector pulling it for a test that wasn't needed. Still keep the dock on the shelf for the drives that actually flag bad, but it's maybe once a week now instead of five times a day. Curious what you all check first on a mystery slowdown, SMART or something else?
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