[SOLVED] Old HDD is slow and dying, safe to transfer contents to another drive?

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stebobibo

Commendable
May 6, 2021
22
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1,515
I have an HDD in my desktop that clearly is dying. This HDD does not have the O/S on it, just programs and media. It takes forever to navigate the files and folders on it. Just be being plugged into the motherboard slows down all processes like typing words into google or running games. Most games crash when that drive is attached, even games that aren't installed on that drive. I thought I was experiencing problems with my memory, but I figured out it was the drive after simply unplugging it and seeing the computer go back to normal. My guess was that background programs are slowing it down. But with the drive plugged in I disabled all unnecessary startup programs, with no change. I also looked at the processes in task manager and googled the most memory intensive ones. They were all necessary processes (Windows O/S related). There are a lot of processes running when no applications are running (over 100), but it would take me forever to google them all. I did 2 malware scans on the PC (with the HDD connected) with Avast and Malwarebytes. The first 1 I ran just ran into 2 "potential security threats" which I clicked on the quarantine button for. They were some windows files or cache or registry or something (wasn't quite sure). The second scan found nothing. I wanted to do a scan with Windows Defender, but its turned off and when I try clicking "click here to turn it on", it just does that loading symbol with my cursor for a while, then says "this operation returned because the timeout period expired". I'm running Windows 7.

So I'm just wondering if I can safely tranfer the contents of this drive to another one? Or will doing so make my computer slow again, effectively just transferring that drives problems to another? Can I transfer everything or should I only transfer my media files (documents, pictures, music, etc)? Your help is greatly appreciated.
 
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