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Slow hard drive = fatal?

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by pwc5003

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Hi, I know this might've been posted or might have not. So I apologize in advance if it has. I'd like to know what are the possible diagnosis for a slow hard drive.

When I access my C drive(my primary and only hard drive) on my desktop, it takes a good amount of time before it reads everything and I can scroll quickly through the contents. However, even my laptop's hard drive is faster. Though my laptop is a 1.5 Ghz intel celeron m with 512 mb of ram. My desktop is 2.08 Ghz amd athlon XP with 1 G of ram.

Also, my windows start up is considerably slower than it should be. Again, even my desktop starts up faster since I changed the ram from 256 to 512. A possible hard drive-to-be failure? Any insights before I take it to a store for analysis would be helpful! Thank you very much!!

6 replies

by mjd420nova

You made no mention of any remedial cleanup that is basic for keeping things running swiftly. First shut down all applications you have running, and do a disk cleanup. Next run an adware scan, a spybot scan and then reboot and do a disk defrag. Things will most likely be much better then.

by pwc5003

I do symantec antivirus, ad adware, and counter spy scans all with updated definitions of course on a bi monthly or more basis. I haven't done disk clean up yet and i think i don't have enough disk space to do a disk defrag. I have about 12 Gigs left on my 80 gig hard drive. the clean up and defrag could probably be the solution?

by techexec2

[i]"i don't have enough disk space to do a disk defrag. I have about 12 Gigs left on my 80 gig hard drive"[/i]

A full and fragmented HDD is a lot slower than an empty (and unfragmented) one. See my other post below...

by techexec2

I've seen your situation before (slow HDD). The causes I have observed have been:

1. PRECURSOR TO HDD FAILURE

Sometimes when a drive slows down for no apparent reason, it soon after expires completely. I have observed this more than once. Keep a REALLY current backup. Or, just change it out. When your tires are going bald, do you wait until they go flat and strand you? Or, do you just replace them.

In Windows XP, regularly run a full "Error Checking", aka Scandisk, with "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" checked. If new bad sectors are found each time you run it, the drive is failing.

2. FRAGMENTED HDD

Fragmentation of your HDD can slow it down a lot more than you might think. Run Defrag.

3. LARGE AND FULL HDD

The data writing density is the same on all tracks of your HDD. Since the outer tracks are longer than the inner ones, the data transfer rate is higher. Thus, the outer tracks give the best I/O performance.

When you first start using an empty HDD, the outer tracks are used first. Thus, a near-empty HDD delivers the best I/O performance. When your drive has a lot of data on it, new files are written to the unallocated space on the inner tracks and performance is lower.

What to do? Get a larger HDD and only fill it up maybe 50% or less. This makes a BIG difference.

4. MAYBE WINDOWS INSTEAD OF HDD?

Your desktop startup might be slow because your desktop Windows configuration is loading a lot of stuff during startup. It may not be your HDD at all. There are a LOT of possibilities (references below).

REFERENCES

Restore Your Computer's Performance with Windows XP
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/northrup_restoreperf.mspx

Solutions to "Slow System Startup"
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/n1041630673

Faster startup of Windows XP
http://www.tweakxp.com/article37030.aspx

Speed up Windows XP
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-10165_7-5554402-1.html

by pwc5003

Thank you very much. I'll try what I can tonight and post later if there's any other problems or if those solutions don't work.

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