suspecting my hard drive/s is super slow

[Roie Shalom]

Hello
My computer have always been a bit slow, but lately it's becoming more and more slow, from the moment of startup. Once it took me about 34 secs to open "My computer", and about the same time to open control panel.
I suspect the hard disk, as it's light is on constantly while computer is thinking. I heard you have a program that I can download to check it's speed. Please give me the name of it and help me find if the hard disk is really the issue.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Roie Shalo,

After you suspect that there is something wrong with your HDD, you should back up the most important information that is stored on it as soon as possible.
How old is the HDD? Keep in mind that the HDD is not the only reason for your computer to be slow. Though, you can start with troubleshooting it first.
I would advise you to download a brand specific testing tool and test the drive. The results will show you the overall health status of the drive.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[fzabkar]

&Roie, you appear to be looking for a benchmarking tool. You could use tools such as HD Tune, ATTO, CrystalDiskMark.

HD Tune also reports the SMART attributes. Look for reallocated, pending, or uncorrectable sectors.

Assuming that you have eliminated other possibilities, you can perform a full surface scan of your HDD with a tools such as HDDScan. This will identify any "slow" sectors, ie those that require several retries.

 

[MADD617]

Have you tried defragging your hard drive? If you don't defrag your hard drive, lots of files get messed up and slows down your computer.
Try using something like Iobit's Smart Defrag 3, which can also prioritize files to make accessing the files you use frequently faster.
If that doesn't help, try Seatools to scan your HDD. The long generic test takes 3.5 hours but it should determine whether or not your HDD might need replacing.

 

[Roie Shalom]

Thank you for replies.
I remember times when I formatted my hds and computer was start to work slow the very same day, and with the hd light constantly on I suspect them.
I downloaded HD tune and did a bechmark.
I don't know how to upload photo here and whether it's possible so I'll share it with you here:
http://postimg.org/image/foijidvnp/

This is the little benchmark I did at the HD where windows 7 is installed. This was my check:
Google Chrome was on with few sites open, and windows media player was playing music. I entered Internet Explorer, procedure I already know cause my computer nearly to die.
As I wrote near the graph, first dropdown is when my computer is struggeling to open the iexplorer. when it's done, you can see the graph is back alomst to normal. Then I inputted another site adress in the iexplorer window I just opened. Again, a hard dropdown in the graph. When finished uploading the site, graph again is back to decent place.
What those this results say? And what does this benchmark check?

(about defragment- I once did a quick check error checking for both HDs, and there was only 5-8% need to do the defragment, so I assumed I don't need it).

 

[Roie Shalom]

Someone?

 

[fzabkar]

The point of a HDD benchmark is to test the drive on its own, without other variables influencing the results. This means that you should kill any background tasks that would be competing with HD Tune for the attention of the CPU and the HDD.

 

[D_Know_WD]

What does the results show when you click on the Health tab? Look for reallocated, pending and uncorrectable sectors.

D_Know_WD

 

[Roie Shalom]

Got it, this time I did the benchmark when computer has just start up. This is the results:

http://postimg.org/image/eunty7s83/

About the healy lab: everything is marked as ok, reallocated sector count 200, pending 200, and offline uncorrectable 200.

 

[D_Know_WD]

This most probably means that the drive is fine. Also, the benchmark curve seems fine as well. Anyway, I would advise you to back up the most important data that is stored on it.
After the HDD seems to be fine, I guess you should test your other components as well.
Apart from that, this is quite an old drive right(and system I guess)? It appears to be SATA 1. Also, were you on another OS when your system was running fine?

D_Know_WD

 

[Roie Shalom]

Back then when my system was fine I was using win7 as well. My hard drive is pretty old I guess.
Yesterday after performing an error checking when computer restarts, it seemed like the computer was back to normal, but today slowliness came again, and if it's not the hard drive then I guess I'll have to open thread in "compenants" forum which may be more general.

 

[D_Know_WD]

What type of of error checking? Do you mean disk error checking: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2641432 ? If this is the case, then the command may have fixed the HDD for a while. You will need to back up the data.
If you did some other type of error checking, then most probably something else is causing the slowness.

D_Know_WD

 

[Roie Shalom]

That is the error checking I did. So it means it's the HD to blame?

 

[D_Know_WD]

Unfortunately, it means that it most probably fixed the HDD for a while but its is deteriorating quickly. I would advise you to back up the important data that is stored on it as soon as possible and replace the drive.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD