Toshiba Laptop: Slow Hard Drive.

Hi,
This is a Satellite A100 running XP Home edition SP3. The hard drive access is super slow, the rest of the computer runs as normal until it needsto access the drive then it slows. I ran "Passmark" Performance test on it it ran through all the CPU, memory ,graphics tests etc. quite quickly, when it got to the hard drive tests it took about 30 minutes to run them and indicated a write/read speed of about 200 kilobytes per second. I have put the drive in external enclosure and accessed on my main computer,it was able to read stuff at normal speeds, I put a new drive in the laptop and installed XP on it, it runs fine. I have ran malware and anti-virus which came up with nothing. Any suggestions much appreciated. Thanks John.

 

Ordinarily, I swear by ATTO.

http://majorgeeks.com/ATTO_Disk_Benchmark_d6359.html


Most drives have an average life expectancy of about five years. Sometimes with the abuse a laptop drive has the potential to take, it can be much less. If you'd like, since the drive is clean, you can "clone" that old drive to the new one. It should be easy, considering your hardware configuration hasn't changed. I prefer Easeus, or Apricorn for drive cloning. Easeus is free.

http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/

 

Hello the mekanic,
Thanks for your advice ,all went well, I cloned the old 40gig drive to a new 80 gig drive using Easeus ,this took 13 hours I then resized the partition using Easeus Partition master this took about 2 minutes. The machine is now running well,thanks again.