My mother’s laptop has been running as fast as a turtle on a snail going uphill for a long time now. Everything has been done to it, including formatting it and installing another, less cumbersome OS, but nothing improves. I have an HHD available, I have done some tests and it does work.
Would changing the hard drive do any good?
Since it hasn’t been mentioned yet… Yes a failing drive will significantly slow down a computer. Drives are built to be fault-tolerant, so if it reads a block of data and that doesn’t match the block’s checksum, the drive will attempt to re-read the same data until it gets what it believes is correct data, or until it gives up and sends a failure to the computer.
So now imagine your drive is in a state where nearly every block is having trouble being read, so it re-reads each block several times, adding a significant amount of time to every operation. A scan of the drive may indicate everything is working correctly if the drive does eventually return valid information, but the drive itself is having to work very hard to get this data.
One thing you might try to check for internal errors is running a read/write test of the drive, and recording the speed these operations were performed at. If that number is close to the parameters of the drive (you can check with the manufacturer or online reviews to find real-world drive speeds) then the drive is probably ok. However if the test is running a lot slower than the expected speeds, it’s a good bet that your drive is failing and you will want to back up the data as soon as possible.
What you say sounds a lot like what is happening with the hard drive. Thanks for clarifying it for me!
Aren’t these sectors detected and blocked when you format and install a new os?
Sectors that cannot be read reliably will get marked out, but I’ve seen plenty of HDDs that tested fine but still had obvious issues when reading data from certain areas. If your OS happens to be within that area then it becomes a problem very quickly, and you’ll probably lose data before the drive marks those sectors as bad.
Older OSes did that, but modern ones usually just do the equivalent of format /q in DOS (write new filesystem metadata only, don’t check for bad sectors)
Is the hard drive failing and constantly blocking reads and writes? Maybe, check the SMART data.
Is the cooler full of hair/fur/dust and clocking the CPU down? Maybe, look at the thermals etc.
If you don’t diagnose issues you are just guessing and potentially wasting money replacing parts that are fine.
I hate to be “anti-environment and pro-capitalism”, but… just buy a new one. The worst thing about HDDs (in my opinion) is that it’s hard to tell when they’ll fail. You don’t have this problem. Clone the drive, spend $20-$50 on the same storage size, and you’re done!
Or double the budget, and upgrade to an SSD. I know it’s easy to suggest someone else spend their money, but that’s really the only option here…
Or double the budget, and upgrade to an SSD.
SSDs <1TB are competitive, if not outright beating, HDDs. You don’t need to double the budget anymore. It might not be the fastest SSD at the cheap range, but the slowest SSD is still going to be faster than any (consumer grade) HDDs
Where I live (Venezuela) computer components are not very cheap or easy to obtain, and I don’t have the money to afford an SSD (at least not now nor a near future)…
You could try getting a SATA SSD. Those are slower than M.2 or NVME-based product, but it will serve you well. Try looking for a low-storage solution for now. Maybe 128 or 250GB should work fine. Since you have a spare HDD, I think it’s okay for now.
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Thanks, Pipey.
Even if your hdd is ok, ssd is much faster, first time you use your laptop with os installed on sdd, it’ll be new and pleasant experience for you that’s for sure, buy cheap one for the first time, 240-256gb is pretty cheap nowadays, and enough for casual web browsing cinema watching and office tasks
Even if your hdd is ok, ssd is much faster,
I second this. Grap a cheap 256GB SSD, use that HDD as external storage device. Your mother will hug you tighter for this :)
Background:
Been using my laptop for 6 years to this point, and thought it was the installed programs and content size that slowed my laptop.
Then I heard somewhere that SSD have gotten cheaper. So I gathered the courage to look on my local stores, and found Lexar NS100 1TB for $72.
After swapping the HDD with this SSD, installed nixos on it, laptop went from taking 2 and a half minutes to start to 15 seconds! And it was consistent every time.
Not only that, but opening apps (libre office suite) went from taking 30 seconds to just 3!
SSD gave a new breath to my somewhat old laptop.
PS: RAM is just as important, And it’s often overlooked. Anything less that 8GB nowadays is not recommended (browsers have been known to use more RAM than expected. To me, tab suspenders where not an option, since to revisit the suspended tab means the browser had to load the page all over again, few seconds delay) 16GB is the sweet spot IMO.
100% yes if it’s failing. Buy an ssd and revel in the new speed, don’t do another spinning disk.
You can check the data the drive itself keeps about disk errors. This data is called SMART.
https://www.howtogeek.com/134735/check-ssd-or-hdd-health-with-smart/
Figure out if the drive is having problems or not, then look at replacing it.
Another thing that slows down old laptops is thermal throttling. Once again there are plenty of programs you can download to check component temperatures. Have you cleaned dust out of the inside of the laptop and re-done the thermal paste?
What size do you need?
I’m a bit late to the party but if you’re still running a machine with BIOS rather than uefi You should definitely look into spinrite 6.1 from grc.net written by Steve Gibson who is nothing short of a genius when it comes to low level hdd optimisation. (7 will support uefi) if your machine has legacy support you might be able to get it booted as well. He has all sorts of utilities including ones to make sure you can spinrite will boot on your machine before purchase
(Shields up ring any bells to the oldies, same guy)
