Chile Forum

I run Windows XP SP3, and it started to boot extremely slow, since yesterday, and the read/write operations to the HDD seem to be very slow.

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Back up your data NOW to another HD...ooops!

Guys, what is the normal time for the 512 byte block to read/write on your notebook? What sort of failure could that be? What sort of testing is there to check if one of the heads has failed?

Do you hear any noise from the drive? Scratching or click of death sorts of noises indicating a physical issue?

Generally my policy with drives is, if I have to ask if it is ok, it gets replaced. The suspect drive gets clearly market "suspect" in permanent marker across the top, and then it is forever used for movie storage and none-critical uses.

The speed of the read / write will be dependent on about a million different factors. Type of cache, code, location of data on platter, what has priority, and so on. Apart from any signs of physical issue with the drive, windows is most likly the cause the slow down.

You might also try booting in to the BIOS, and running SMART drive test to see what it says (if it shows there).

Still, my money is on windows. For every slow hard drive caused by a physical issue with the actual drive, there is about 10,000 computers that are just fine and being slowed down by windows and just appear to be running slow.

By the way, you can not really compare one hard drive's performance to another. They are all apples and oranges. They are often not even the same among make, model, and production series. It is why the data recovery companies buy huge batches of every drive that comes on the market, because they might need a replacement part from an almost the exact same drive in the production batch to eliminate variations to make a head to the platter spin correctly. They are essentially all unique; well, at least as far as end users are concerned.

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< deleted by gato >

Clone the drive immediately, it may survive, or may die. I now use a Mac mainly because of its ability to constantly backup to an external HD, when the HD dies I just slap in a new one and reload the entire contents. But for travel I have an Air which has a flash drive>no moving parts, so far so good.

What is showing wrong in the SMART test?

Did you backup your data before continuing to play around with the drive?

Have you checked to see if its your CPU or RAM slowing things down, if the RAM is crammed full then it slows everything down.

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