Do harddrives slow down with age?

Question

My (windows based) laptop is coming up to six years old now, and it still has semi respectable specs - Core 2 Duo 2.6ghz, 1gb Ram, 500gb HDD, 256mb ATI graphics card. Although the hardware is on its last legs, I am quite proficient with XP and keeping things nice and tidy.

I have minimal start up processes and defrag every six weeks or so.

Now I am experiencing slow downs, but I do not think it is my software being the cause. I am pretty sure it is my HDD being old and decrepit that is doing it.

• Do HDDs get slower with age / use?
• On average, how often should I be replacing my HDD?
• Is there any way of testing / monitoring the HDD speeds?

Answer 1

No, harddrives don't get measurably slower with age. Drives can get worn mechanically, and they can get occasional bad sectors, but either they work for decades or they fail hard and quick after a while - not a slow decay. As Ignacio states, there's a bit of age-related maintenance inside the drive, but that's on a scale you wouldn't notice.

Windows is known to slow down (see, it's software-related) over time, especially if you install&uninstall applications often. At any rate, if the machine is running for 6 years on the same Windows installation, you're doing well! I would suggest to back up the machine, then reinstall the OS and your programs.

I agree with you that the specs of the machine make it useful for several more years. If you have (access to) GRC.com's SpinRite, you might want to try it out. It can refresh your disk.

Answer 2

As hard drives age, they may need to remap reserve sectors in place of non-working sectors. A SMART tool should be able to tell you how many of these remappings have been performed, as well as other factors that may be a result of old age.

Answer 3

Conventional rotating drives may not slow down with age, but solid state drives (SSDs) may slow down with use (especially when they're filled to near capacity). This is more apparent when dealing with older SSDs, older OSes, and/or older drivers that may not understand or fully utilize facilities that combat this, such as TRIM.

See AnandTech's "SSD Anthology" and other articles for a detailed description of why: essentially, SSDs have different limitations than hard drives (e.g. their "erase block" size) and to act like traditional hard drives they need to have a "translation layer" of sorts.

That layer ends up being almost as complex as a modern filesystem.

Filesystems themselves can experience performance degradation in a number of similar cases:

• large numbers of files or directories
• fragmentation (as you pointed out, a defrag helps with this)
• low remaining space (it may take more "work" to determine where to place pieces of files)

All that having been said, I agree with torbengb: your issue is much more likely a software one.

A few options:

• If you feel up to it, grab the Sysinternals Suite or similar tools and do some sleuthing: it may be a single app, dll, or service that's hogging some critical resource (disk, memory, or CPU). With luck you can just disable or reinstall whatever is being pesky.
• Boot from a live CD or USB stick, or install a fresh copy of Windows on a separate partition. The USB or CD may not have the same performance characteristics, but if things feel zippy again, it's likely software.
• Bite the bullet: back up, format, and reinstall, then be selective and take time when putting apps back. Most power users end up doing this every so often anyway, and it almost always provides a tangible result.

Answer 4

The answer by torbengb above is correct. However the later posted comment about processors slowing down definitely isn't - processors are digital and cannot 'burn out slowly' - their operation is 100% governed by the clock oscillator which does NOT slow down!

Answer 5

I dont know about other answers. But in my personal experience HDDs slow down considerably over time. Eventually start up will take more time. By start up i mean actually start using the computer even after desktop is launched, because your hdd is going to show busy for quite some time. Every online answer associated these slow downs to windows and too much programs installed. But even after formatting the hdd and reinstalling windiws the hdd behaves the same. Over time your hdd is going to be at 100% use for even running or opening the tiniest of programs. You know its your hdd that had slowed down because once you replace it the speed is almost back to normal. I think the hdd rpm slows down over time. Maynot be true. But still its the hdd the culprit that slows down your pc. The longer you use your pc the slower it gets. If you are an everyday user, you will start seeing signs after a year. After that it becomes more and more apparent.

Answer 6

I am a software developer who has written a few simple disk diagnostic tools. Definitely some hard drives slow down to crawl when the get older. I noticed that some older drives have a range of sectors that take a long time to read. I assume its because the original ones went bad or are flakey and the disks firmware algorithm to go get the spare sectors kills performance. Anyways every single time I have a PC that has a irritating lag in Windows, If after virus checkers and running msconfig it still is slow, then I replace the hard drive and presto-magico its fast again.

Answer 7

I've wondered about this issue as well.

My experience is that the updates to Windows XP tend to slow down the system very noticeably.

A fresh install of Windows XP (without any service packs) might perform lightning fast even on an old box, but once you have installed all automatic updates up to Service Pack 3 (literally a few hours and numerous restarts later), things aren't running so speedy anymore. This is without any extra software installed.

Now, if you have been using your system for 6 years, my take on this is that all the incremental updates will have incrementally slowed down your computer substantially.

Answer 8

Yup, hard drives have moving parts. So they eventually wear out and die some or the other time. Even if you take care of a hard drive very nicely, it's always great to have a backup.

The newer SSDs (Solid State Drives) are very much different from conventional HDDs. They don't have moving parts, so they are better options. They are shock proof too. But they're more expensive.

Answer 9

I have experience this slowing of the hard drive even complete HHD crash with all info lost, i usually get 4 years out of my hard drives before i start to worry, yes re-installing Os systems can help but over time( i do this multiple time through the HHD life) Drives FAIL (things that move NEVER LAST) things u might not think of that affect drives:

1. Hard shut downs Via power outages/surges, breakers popin or even pesky little brother pulling power cord from socket.

2. Filling your hard drive to max multiple times ( the arm in the drive that moves rapidly gets use to a certain range of movement when the exceed that movement the ARM slows, not the spinning disk.

3. Moving a computer the arm inside a hard drive the reading head is very close to the disk, a piece of dust is bigger than the gap between the two, so movement how ever small can still affect the drive

4. Viruses ( although we caught most if not all can affect ur drive even if its a little amount of time)

5. HEAT ( things create heat when moving )

6. Windows update can tell the computer to do something a different way that make programs not to work or even slow HHDs

Answer 10

I found that as the harddrive ages, it starts making louder noise which goes something like 'click-click-click' whenever the harddrive is being accessed/written and while its doing that I experience the computer freezes/slows-down for a moment. And at a later age the computer will refuse to boot sometimes and eventually one day it would completely stop booting.

But a clean windows installation always fastens things up.

Answer 11

I agree that the old HDD will slow down. I have an HP i5 desktop over 5 years old which took over 15 minutes to get going after startup with the original HDD being W.D. I purchased a new SSD, made a clone of my HDD, and replaced the HDD with the cloned SSD. Unbelievable increase in speed on startup and moving back and forth with programs. I expected an increase in speed because of the Solid State Drive, but not like this. The drive is a clone so nothing changed software wise or OS wise. Best move I have ever made!

Answer 12

Probably very late to do so, but I simply have to respond to this. Yes, hard disks definitely slow in operation with age. However, Windows will slow down terribly too. This is why I always reinstall at least twice a year. That said, did you know that roughly 65 to 70% of your system speed is due to just two variables? Fixed disk subsystem, and motherboard throughput. You can't do much about the way manufacturers clutter up the BUS with signals you never use these days, but there is something you can do for the HDD.

I noticed that a lot of people here are wise to reinstalling. Well add one more step to that. Go to the drive manufacturer's web site, and locate their utility for low level formatting your drive. All it really does is set all the bits on the drive to zeroes, but in all reality? That's a lot. Most format utilities leave a lot of clutter behind. Also, if you're a Windows user, try Linux or one of the BSD OSes for a change. Their file systems have a different method for storing and locating files. In Linux, the tools used are called inodes and superblocks, which contain the precise address for each file. The result is that they don't fragment nearly as much. Not even close. So yes, hard drives definitely slow down with age. But there are things you can do which will usually help a lot. Hope this does help somebody out there.