Dell L502x - I feel HDD is dragging the performance - Suggestions ?

whenever there is some HDD writing / reading related work , the whole OS starts to slow down. Mine is a i7 Q 2630 , 4 GB ram , 500 GB HDD.

WEI says hard disk performance is at 5.9

Is there a way to know that my HDD is running at optimal speed and capacity. I dont feel its at 7200rpm , rather far below than 5400 rpm. Need advice to improve performance of my HDD

 

Have you tried running like HD Tune on it and see your read/write speeds? Also maybe you want to run diagnostics on it. If your laptop seems abnormally slow, usually first thing I suspect is a failing hard drive.

 

Thanks for the reply. I downloaded HD Tune Pro(trial) and did the benchmark for read alone , write needs all partition to be rmoved. Here is the screenshot



The slowing down is from the time i got the laptop , its not something its starting to show up off-lately. I am doing all cleaning regularly using CCleaner.

 

It doesn't look too bad for a 2.5 inch 7200rpm hard drive. 5400rpm hard drives generally have much slower average transfer rate. (see, for instance, http://levelx.me/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/hdtune-benchmark-fujitsu-mhz2320bh-g2-thumb.png )

 

As i said , whenver the system starts to write to the disk heavily , the system slows down . since i cant test the write speed here , is there any other way to know the performance lag particularly seen while HDD access(read/write) ?

 

Sorry for bumping this , but It seems i can clearly make out that whenever an application/game tries to access the HDD , there is slowing down of the system , even resulting in hanging , most probably due to wait from the HDD to retrieve / save the data.

While playing skyrim / anno 2070 , the game runs fine , but whenever the game tries to autosave , or even on manual save the game hangs or slows down.

This things happens in firefox too.

apart from the bench i posted in my prev post , is there a way to get an idea about random write/read ? Also is there any option which i can turn-on/off to speed up things ? it really doesnt feel like 7200rpm HDD

Please help , since many time the application/games hang and result in "xyz Not responding error" . I even tried to reinstall the full os with original Windows 7 , rather than dell OEM

 

Your score and hd tach results show your hdd is performing optimally. Only way to speed things up is to get an Ssd drive.

 

i'd fork over the money and get an SSD drive, purchased one myself, with 500mb read/write speeds, or close enough to it and never looked back, OS loads in seconds. SC2 loading bar flies, same thing with BF3. I've yet to find something to fully utilize the HDD 100% most of the time lol.

Lately on bensbargains.net, i've been seeing a lot of high powered low space HDDs on sale, i'd hit that up if i were you, 120GB for 120$ with 450+ read and write speeds aren't that bad

 

@Risco , I think the lag which i am experiencing has to do with random write/reads
anyway to know it ?

 

Have you tried defragging

 

Do you have sufficient free space on your HD? I happened to read a post in another forum from a user who has only 600 MB free space on a 700 GB disk, which is nowhere near enough free space. Windows needs a good amount of free space to work well.

 

1.) I have defragler and do defragging regularly
2.) I have around 200 GB free space
3.) I had this problem in my prev installtion and also in my current fresh original windows 7 installation , ie not a dell oem OS