Hard disk crash imminent?

My friend has had her desktop PC for more than 5 years. I think that the HD is on its way out. Why? It's very very very slow. It takes minutes just to open a window.
I don't think it's adware because I cleaned it up with the likes of MalwareBytes, Spybox ... I just backed up all her data.
What does an HD that is about to crash do?
On average, how long does an HD last?

 

an HDD will last 3-5 years on average.

you can get a program like HDtune to check the SMART status.

and do a CHKDSK in Command Prompt to check for bad sectors.

 

Try a program like HD Tune to grab the S.M.A.R.T. Data and see if there is anything reported to be in the range of failing.

While a constant ticking can be the sign of a read head failure, drives can fail silently from bad motors. The smart data will show things like spin up time which can spot a failing motor.

I had a register that was running really slowly for a period of time and the drive wasnt making any noise. I punched the register the hdd died and they fixed it, fastest register in the store after that.

 

Depends on the usage, physical damage also really reduces the life expectancy of a hard drive. Is it making weird noises ? Have you tried defragging the hard drive ? Older versions of Windows create more fragmentation as a result of their regular work, also some pieces of malware are not really easy to track down.

 

Try reinstalling windows.

 

a hard drive crash is *always* imminent. That's what backups are for.

Go buy two new hard drives and image the current system to both of them before the current drive fails.

 

CrysalDiskInfo - that was a free installation free utility that will read SMART data and diplay it for you.

About "HDD crashes" - in my experience HDD failures happen out of nowhere.

Also, it could be very heavy fragmentation...

 

Get Ultimate Boot CD, which has a collection of tests you can run in DOS.

 

Yeah, but it's more likely when the HDD has run its course after a number of years...

 

Give auslogics registry defrag a try, although i know you have run alot of scanners etc, i have my windows 98 HDD Still running after about 11 years?

 

Run the diagnostic utility you can d/l for free from the website of the hard drive's manufacturer. There are also some good free third-party diagnostic tools, as other posters have mentioned.

While it's entirely possible the drive is on it's way out, the mere appearance of increased slowness is not an accurate way of telling how far out the door it is already, since that could be due to any number of things having nothing to do with the drive itself.

 

Sometimes it very very very slow. Other times, it's back to normal speed.
HD Tune didn't find anything wrong with the HDD. But I think that it checks for surface errors or bad sectors, not for mechanical slow down.
In my opinion, the problem is that the disk is not spinning as fast as it should, which causes the slow down. Is there a way to check for that?

 

I may be wrong, but I don't think it would read at all if it was not up to normal speed. I don't believe the electronics support any sort of variable speed when reading or writing.

Gary

 

It may be that it is slowing down when it tries to read/write to a bad sector.

 

give Spinrite try...may recover your hard drive status.

 

Like Gary said, if that were the case, then it wouldn't read at all, and if it were physically slowing down for a significant period of time (say even a second - that's almost an eternity in computer-time), it'd probably time out and you'd get an error saying the OS couldn't read the disk. I was going to suggest that KimoT's suggestion could be right if it had to keep rereading bad sectors, but you've apparently checked and not found any. Did you run a SMART utility? If it's getting a lot of read/write errors that are forcing it to re-read or re-write, then perhaps there's an alignment defect or a problem with the head.

In any event, if you can't trust the drive and you're sure it's not something else like malware, then swapping it out now, while it's still working and you can get a good cloned image/backup off of it might be the best approach.

 

What does that do?

 

It's any hard drive utility that can read/analyse the drive's internal diagnostic data, a technology known as Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology - aka SMART - it will tell you whether or not your drive is still within spec or not. The manufacturer of your hard drive should have a free downloadable diagnostic utility on its website that will be able to do just that.

If your drive's SMART data shows that it's out of spec, then it's a good idea to get prepared for a drive replacement sooner rather than later.