Is my hard drive dying?

I have a 3-4 year old HP laptop (dont laugh, it was my first computer) that has been unusually slow for the past few weeks. On top of that, the HDD's read noise has gone from a soft whir to a... not so soft whir. If my drive is dying, what would you recommend as a replacement?

Sounds like its on its last leg.

I would get the SMART data, but it probably won't show much as it sounds like a bearing is going bad.

You could get (assuming 2.5" SATA) any SSD or laptop HDD.

if the hdd itself was dying you would notice a super long post and/or windows startup and sometimes no boot at all. to me I agree it sounds like a bearing as well, still deems replacement

overclocking101 said:

if the hdd itself was dying you would notice a super long post and/or windows startup and sometimes no boot at all. to me I agree it sounds like a bearing as well, still deems replacement

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I noticed that as well. I timed it at around 37 secs to get to the login screen, but it was sluggish for over a full minute after logging in. After that, it runs okay until you launch a program. I don't see how it could be anything other than the hdd.

On a laptop that old the cooling fan can get noisy and the cooling fins can get totally plugged with dust, especially if you have a cat. I had to replace the cooling fan on my T500 and cleaned a lot of dust and cat fur out of the cooling fans. At first I wondered if the noise was the drive dying.

But if disk operations are taking a long time, it probably is your drive. Good opportunity to upgrade to an SSD.

JJJMan75 said:

I noticed that as well. I timed it at around 37 secs to get to the login screen, but it was sluggish for over a full minute after logging in. After that, it runs okay until you launch a program. I don't see how it could be anything other than the hdd.

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YEP HDD FOR SURE. I highly reccomend kingston ssd now ssd's for reliability. got one 30gb been going for almost 3yrs now. I love my crucial m500 BUT if you dont have sata 6g it will be only marginally better then the kingstons. I bought a corsair FORCE ssd and it didnt even last one full yr. I do not suggest those drives at all, in fact it really left a bad taste in my mouth about corsair ssd's. But I have also heard good things about the higher end kingston ssd's. but major thing in the suggestion situation is if you have sata 6g or sata 3g

I would purchase samsung 840 evo it's a great drive.

overclocking101 said:

... but major thing in the suggestion situation is if you have sata 6g or sata 3g

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It depends on your strategy. When I bought an SSD for my Thinkpad T500 it was nearly three years old. However I had already replaced the cooling fan and bumped RAM to 8GB. I bought originally with a Core 2 Duo T9400 which was one of the higher end processors available at that time. It's not quite middle of the road today but between the extra RAM and the speed of the SSD it is pretty acceptable. It boots Linux in about 12 seconds (not counting POST) and I can log in even quicker. I think the SATA is SATA I (150 GBs? Might be wrong there on units.) The drive (Crucial M4/256Gb) will handle far more but nevertheless, it produced a nice performance boost.

To get back to my strategy, my thought was to get more than I needed for the Thinkpad thinking it would go into my next laptop. I haven't exercised that strategy yet as the T500 is still ticking along. I have recently purchased a 240GB SSD for my desktop because it was less than half the price of the M4. And I like 12 second boot times.

I'm not sure this has turned out to be a good strategy. I have enjoyed it in the Thinkpad but when that is replaced, I'm not sure the laptop that replaces it will have space for a 2.5" SSD. I think lots will be moving toward M-SATA. And I don't need it in my desktop any more. It becomes an expensive spare drive.

Lucky for you, the prices of SSDs have come down so much that it is easier to justify the upgrade, regardless of which one you choose.

Update: I found an old Gauntlet Node wifi hard drive lying around. I took the drive out of the plastic casing/battery and swapped it with my laptop drive. They're both 2.5 inch drives, so they fit perfectly. The new drive is a 300 gb (more like 290) Toshiba hard drive. I'll use it for the essentials and keep the Node for storage.