Advice on hard drive replacement scenario - thoughts?

[jtcotton63]

I would like some opinions on a laptop hard drive replacement situation

My father has an Acer Aspire 7750Z-4623. Intel Pentium B940, 4GB RAM, 640GB 5400 RPM HDD, Windows 7 64bit (full specs here)

My father has had this laptop for a couple years now. The laptop mostly worked fine, except about six months ago it began to throw BSODs randomly. So, my father took it down to a local geek-squad-type shop and the tech informed him that the hard drive was going bad. My father bought a new hard drive from the tech, who imaged the old hard drive onto the new one, put it in my father's laptop, and then gave my father's laptop back to him.

Everything should have been fine - except since the very moment he got it back from the tech, the computer has been sluggish. He used to run dual monitors and lots of application windows open at the same time, but now he can't bc data is so slow coming back from the hard drive. Playing back video is sluggish and choppy, which is something that my dad needs to do for his business.

My dad took it back to the tech who fixed it, and he told my father that the computer didn't have enough RAM in it. However, the computer worked fine for these same tasks before the hard drive replacement even with the amount of RAM that is in it.

Any thoughts?

 

[drtweak]

I would find out exactly what he put in it.

Download Crystal Disk Info to the laptop and run it. Make sure it is new (You can tell by the power on hours) if it has a few thousand on it that is NOT a new hard drive. Also post what model the hard drive is (it will list that as well)

Also what version of windows is he running? 4Gb of ram is more than enough for basic users

 

[jtcotton63]

@drtweak sorry it took me so long to get back to you. To answer your questions:

1) The disk is new, i used CrystalDisk to check.
2) The OS is Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
3) The disk is a HGST Travelstar Z7K500, 500GB

I also ran CrystalDiskMark to bench the r/w performance on the disk - Here's what the numbers came back to be. They're actually pretty dismal:

Seq Q32T1 R: 113.2 MB/s W: 97.58 MB/s
4K Q32T1 R: 0.765 MB/s W: 0.624 MB/s
Seq: (Didn't finish)
4K: R: 0.309 MB/s W: 0.474 MB/s

I'm going to look into making sure the tech installed the driver from the disk manufacturer (if there is one). To me, that seems the next logical step. After that, it could be that this is just a bad disk. It has pretty lousy ratings on newegg.

 

[drtweak]

Any hard drive drivers are just Microsoft drivers that are 10+ years sold and all hard drives and SSD's still use them so don't worry about hard drive drivers.

Sounds like their is something else going on. I would ask what he used to clone it. Also if the hard drive was going bad, when you clone it, it can't copy over any bad sectors so that data is just gone so that could be causing issues as well.

Might have to do a wipe and reinstall or an in place upgrade (just install with the same version of windows you have while in windows, do NOT start up the disk/usb drive from bootup)

 

[popatim]

Perhaps the old drive was an sshd?
Your benchmarks aren't way off imo, check that the sata port mode is ahci and not sata/legacy in the bios. If it is sata then come back and let us know and we can guide you thru switching it. Its more then just changing the setting.