Best way to diagnose slow hard drive

Hey there. My wife's Macbook was acting suuuper slow. I planned on reformatting it and figured I would upgrade it with a high-end SSD. So now I have the original SATA drive from her Macbook and put it into a Windows 7 laptop. I'm noticing the drive is still super slow, and I'm assuming that it's failing. However, it passes Seatools tests and whatnot. So is there any other tests I should try before simply throwing the thing out because it simply "feels like it's going bad"?

Edit: for example, I've got a Dell XPS 1340 and with a fresh Windows 7 install, it takes about 2 minutes to boot. Everything is just slooooowwww, just like it was on the Macbook.

 

You can show S.M.A.R.T. here.
Did you format it?

 

Hey there, what do you mean by "show SMART here"? It passes SMART on Seatools, but is there some kind of log I can copy / paste? And yeah, did a full format.

 

There is a schedule with data. Google any picture called hdd smart. You could use HDTune if there is free version.

 

I ran HDTune and this is what was produced:



Does this indicate anything? The drive is a Seagate ST9160314ASG (5400RPM, 160GB, 8MB cache). I checked device manager and it's claiming to be in UDMA 6. Any pointers?

 

What James meant by SMART are those values (they are also available in HDTune)



I see that the drive is running a tad hot, not sure it's hot enough to affect performance though. Also, while something may be wrong with the drive, we're still talking about a 160GB 5400 RPM drive which is a slow drive to begin with.

 

Isn't 60 celcius around the max operating temp for laptop hard drives? Also, you might be right about the 5400RPM being slow. I've been using SSD for the past year and may have forgotten how slow older drives are. I'm about to sell this laptop though and just want to make sure the included drive is working correctly... don't wanna swindle anyone. Here's the data... does this suggest failure?

HD Tune: ST9160314ASG Health

ID Current Worst ThresholdData Status
(01) Raw Read Error Rate 118 99 6 172565218 Ok
(03) Spin Up Time 100 99 0 0 Ok
(04) Start/Stop Count 96 96 20 4246 Ok
(05) Reallocated Sector Count 100 100 36 0 Ok
(07) Seek Error Rate 78 60 30 71767481 Ok
(09) Power On Hours Count 95 95 0 5108 Ok
(0A) Spin Retry Count 100 100 97 0 Ok
(0C) Power Cycle Count 96 96 20 4176 Ok
(B8) (unknown attribute) 100 100 99 0 Ok
(BB) (unknown attribute) 100 100 0 0 Ok
(BC) (unknown attribute) 100 100 0 0 Ok
(BD) (unknown attribute) 100 100 0 0 Ok
(BE) Airflow Temperature 61 58 45 706150439 Ok
(BF) G-sense Error Rate 100 100 0 378 Ok
(C0) Power Off Retract Count 98 98 0 4356 Ok
(C1) Load Cycle Count 1 1 0 250765 Ok
(C2) Temperature 39 42 0 39 Ok
(C3) Hardware ECC Recovered 64 54 0 172565218 Ok
(C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 0 Ok
(C6) Offline Uncorrectable 100 100 0 0 Ok
(C7) Ultra DMA CRC Error Count 200 200 0 0 Ok
(FE) (unknown attribute) 1 1 0 2338 Ok

Power On Time : 5108
Health Status : Ok

Edit - Here's the screenshot:

 

5400 RPM is considered slow, definitely. It could be that the platters are physically fine, which is why your S.M.A.R.T data shows that the drive is in good health. But if the motor is tired, that will affect spin up and read + write speeds - which I don't think HDTune or HD Sentinel, etc. will tell you the state of the motor.

 

run the error scan to see if you have any bad sectors. i had 2 a while back and it totally messed up my hard drive. a friend today has 1 bad sector on a partitioned section and it cant read it at all.
might take a few hours to run the full scan.

 

No bad sectors. Based on error free scans and the details listed from the SMART scan, does it seem like this drive is safe for sale?

 

Definitely you can sell it inside in the laptop.

Just curious. could you download Crysta disk mark and show us tests and also do a speed test using HDTune on all HDD so we could see graphic.

 

You may want to benchmark it first, but if it looks okay, then just be sure to wipe it ( not format - wipe). Outside of that, it should be fine to sell.