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Can a damaged hard drive slow down a computer? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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My mother's laptop has been running as fast as a turtle on a snail going uphill for a long time now. Everything has been done to it, including formatting it and installing another, less cumbersome OS, but nothing improves. I have an HHD available, I have done some tests and it does work.

Would changing the hard drive do any good?

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Since it hasn't been mentioned yet... Yes a failing drive will significantly slow down a computer. Drives are built to be fault-tolerant, so if it reads a block of data and that doesn't match the block's checksum, the drive will attempt to re-read the same data until it gets what it believes is correct data, or until it gives up and sends a failure to the computer.

So now imagine your drive is in a state where nearly every block is having trouble being read, so it re-reads each block several times, adding a significant amount of time to every operation. A scan of the drive may indicate everything is working correctly if the drive does eventually return valid information, but the drive itself is having to work very hard to get this data.

One thing you might try to check for internal errors is running a read/write test of the drive, and recording the speed these operations were performed at. If that number is close to the parameters of the drive (you can check with the manufacturer or online reviews to find real-world drive speeds) then the drive is probably ok. However if the test is running a lot slower than the expected speeds, it's a good bet that your drive is failing and you will want to back up the data as soon as possible.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago

What you say sounds a lot like what is happening with the hard drive. Thanks for clarifying it for me!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Aren't these sectors detected and blocked when you format and install a new os?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Sectors that cannot be read reliably will get marked out, but I've seen plenty of HDDs that tested fine but still had obvious issues when reading data from certain areas. If your OS happens to be within that area then it becomes a problem very quickly, and you'll probably lose data before the drive marks those sectors as bad.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Older OSes did that, but modern ones usually just do the equivalent of format /q in DOS (write new filesystem metadata only, don't check for bad sectors)