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My laptop has a Hybrid HDD with a 32 GB SSD for cache. I removed the HDD to put in a cloned SSD, but I've had to put the HDD back in so I can get some data off of it.

But the HDD is now running super slow (Windows takes over 10 minutes or longer to boot). I've run CHKDSK with /r (it found about 230 MB of bad sectors after running for 18 hours) but it still runs super slow. The data is still in tact - if I boot to a Linux flash drive I can still mount the Windows partition and copy data off of it, but that too runs slow. hdparm -tT /dev/sda shows varying speeds, from 145 kBps to up to about 90 MB/sec.

In the BIOS it shows the HDD as not being a RAID drive and the SSD is now showing as disabled. Since this uses a RAID set up, I haven't touched it thinking it would create a RAID array and wipe both drives.

Can I use the SSD as a cache to the HDD again? Or will doing this create a new RAID array and wipe out the HDD?

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Expanding on what @TomaszSzczypel said - your problem is most likely that the hard drive is dying.

The appropriate action is to do a bit copy of the drive ASAP to recover as much data as you can off it - I'd strongly suggest finding a suitable Linux distro and running (Gnu) DD Rescue to do the bit copy - you may want to run it twice - once starting at the beginning, when it goes slow, stop it and start it in reverse. Leave it for as long as possible (quite possibly days) to try and suck out as much data as possible. Then either work on the cloned drive, or, preferably, clone THAT drive again, and work on the second clone (so that if something goes wrong during recovery you can make another clone and try again).

Note that just because you can see data on the drive, doesn't mean its not damaged - it just means that the part of the drive which indexes the filenames is OK.

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  • Thanks for the comments. My original question was whether or not I could re-sync the HDD with its SSD cache, but it's a moot point now - I've restored everything to the new SSD. It's not just that I can see data - I can actually copy the data and use the drive, it's just slow. I've actually copied about 300 GB off of the drive and the copied data doesn't show any sign of corruption. But yeah, I'm sure the drive is dying because of it's horrible performance. It is a 1 TB drive but there are only 230 MB or so of bad sectors, for the record. :)
    – Tensigh
    Commented Oct 5, 2016 at 12:25

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