7 year old hard drive

[lola213]

Hello! I've been looking online for answers to see why my system storage has been running slow. I still have the 1tb hard drive from 2009 when i did my first full system build and it still working as we speak. Over the years I added new hard to the point where i have a brand new system from 2013.
I am still using the the same 1td hard drive but for storage now while my system drive is an SSD

Question is my system has started to run slow last month and thought i just had to do a clean up or maybe a virus but so far i cleaned my system a bit and its still the same. Is this a sign that my hard drives is failing?

I do have 4 other hard drives with more storage and some seem to be getting slow also and they are 3 to 5 years old. When look at videos or pictures it takes a 15 seconds for thumbnail to show up and for video it takes 3 to 5 seconds for the video to start playing when i open it, It use to load everything right away!

System:

cpu: i7 4770k
mobo: z87x-ud4h
storage:
1863GB Western Digital WDC
WD20EARX-00PASB0

931GB Western Digital WDC WD10EZEX-00BN5A0

232GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO (X2 and 1 for system)

931GB Western Digital WDC WD10EALX-009BA0 (7 years almost 8 years old)

465GB Hitachi HDS721050CLA362

 

[R_1]

as a drive fills up it will get a tad slower. drives write from the outside of the platter in. I remember short stroking drive for maximum performance.
the first data on the drive is the fastest. (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157-2.html) for more info
the pixie dust on the drives can also age and get damaged. (think a magnetic pimple - a raised area on the flat platter that is harder to read)
regular maintenance will keep the bad sectors re-mapped to spares.

for directories with many files(photo and video) it is normal for the drive to take a few seconds to populate the thumbnails, in my experience.

SSDs do not have any moving parts, no pixie dust, and massively more I/Os than a HDD but suffer from high pricing and low capacities.

the drive manufacturer will have diagnostic software, I suggest you DL and run it if you have any doubts as to the drives fitness. Drive can die at anytime with no warning at all or slowly over time, make sure your data is backed up in any case.
crystaldisk info can give you some information such as temps and hours of operation

 

[Colif]

You should download Data life guard for Windows from here: http://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?lang=en
run it on both 1tb western digital drives, run the short and extended tests and see how they perform

the evo can be tested using Magician since it has benchmarks in it and also shows smart scores

This appears to be the link for Hitachi tools: https://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

 

[lola213]

Ok ill start running these test and i better get a new hard drive and start transferring files over.