are hard drives becoming disposable media?

[Stark]

We have about 300 computers in our company. Of those, maybe 100 are celeron 400-800 MHz vintage Dells. It seems that lately many of them are slowing down, or at least we're getting more complaints about their speed.

Well, we've tried reformatting and adding memory to no avail, but when we simply replace the old HDD with a cheap 20GB 7200 RPM drive, the systems run like a champ. All they do is run phone queue software, office, and IE, so the cpu isn't that big an issue.

I've seen this with some friends too... their computers start lagging, they replace the HDD and voila, it's like a new system!

My theory is that the HD is one of the few moving parts in a computer (along with fans, cd-rom, floppy) and should be expected to last a finite number of hours. People should expect a need to replace a HDD every few years even if they don't upgrade their systems.

Am I mad, or am I on to something here?

 

[Tanked]

Hard drives will eventually fail (as with all mechanical devices) but they should last longer then a few years. The majority of my 8 year old WD drives still function although they are slow.

You also have to be careful because the older drives may be getting bogged down with Windows crap, and it may not actually be the drive itself.

 

[ai42]

I don't think hard drives are slowing down per say. I think that programs (even common stuff like Norton Antivirus etc), are using more and more resources. Which means more and more stuff to transfer off the hard drive. Therefore replacing a hard drive with a newer model provides a great increase in speed due to the much higher transfer speeds off it.

But quite honestly I don't see why people pay up all kinds of cash for a high end CPU/RAM and then slap in a 5400rpm hard drive (which is actually ok for games since maps and most stuff is put into RAM). But a very fast hard drive provides pretty good all around speed.

 

[spanky]

hmm... so would it be healthier for my hd to keep my pc running all night, or power it down at night? i've heard that when u power on ur pc... the initial start up process is stressful on the hd. i have no idea where i read that... probably somewhere on the forums. any truth to that?

 

[allies]

Spanky - I've heard that as well, and although it makes sense that starting up would put stress on the hard drive than when it's just idling, can anyone confirm it?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

it's been debated forever and there is no definite answer. the common conclusion is that if you are going to be away from your computer for more than 2 or so hours, its probably better to turn it off, otherwise, if you're going to come back to it fairly soon, you should leave it on. personally i leave everything on 24/7, and in general, flaky hardware is flaky hardware, your powering on/off habits arent going to stop a bad drive from crapping on you, nor will they make a good drive die. stuff just dies, don't worry about it so much.

and as for the original question, a hard drive does not slow down over time, unless it is malfunctional. old drives always were slow, we just notice it more now that we have newer drives to compare to.

 

[BentValve]

Originally posted by: allies
Spanky - I've heard that as well, and although it makes sense that starting up would put stress on the hard drive than when it's just idling, can anyone confirm it?

I'd say the whole system is stressed somwhat when turning it on, if you left it on 24/7 then I would guess that is slightly better than turning it on and off 3 or 4 times a day.

I found a happy medium by shutting mine down in the evening and turn it on in the morning most of the time, sometimes I run it all night because I want to contribute more to Kazaa.

 

[jarsoffart]

I have a 3 year old Dell XPS T500 and it is getting extremely sluggish. The hard drive is a lot louder than it used to be. Your comment has made me ponder replacing the hard drive. It's been loud for over a year, but performance seems to just get worse and worse. I'm running Windows XP on it and only NAV runs in the background. The drive is a lot louder than my Western Digital WD1000BB and IBM 60GXP. I was hoping the HD would break down sooner so I could get a replacement within the Dell warrunty, but my warrunty ran out a few days ago and the hard drive still works. Hopefully some expert can come in and shed some light on this.

 

[crisscross]

People should expect a need to replace a HDD every few years even if they don't upgrade their systems.

Excellent point! The speed improved dramatically when I moved from a Pentium 200 with a 4GB 4600RPM to a PII350, 256MB PC100 SDRAM and a 7200RPM Hard Drive wheras the speed difference when I upgraded the processor to a Athlon XP 1800 and PC2100DDR was only marginal. Now by speed I mean boot time. I believe that if there is one thing that's holding back today's processors, RAM and Video Cards it's the hard disk. Agreed that there are high speed SCSI drives, but I would like to see better speeds with IDE Drives.

 

[chizow]

I haven't had a hard drive fail on me yet, but then again I replace one about every 6 mos. (or whenever I feel like rapin' Staples 😉 ) So yah, I guess they kinda are disposable. I'm good about backing up my data files to CD and I also keep a separate driver (usually an older/slower one) that is strictly for data/drivers/updates. This allows for easy updates and migration, as those updates and drivers need to be replaced after a while too 🙂

Chiz

 

[Smilin]

Funny I just mentioned this in another thread:

The generall "responsiveness" of your computer can mostly be "felt" from a fast hard drive. The time you spend waiting on apps to load, boot time, document load time...in other words time you are actually waiting seconds instead of milliseconds is determined by hard drive speed.

Going to a newer drive on a really old computer is going to make a big difference mostly because of platter density. Sure 7200 rpm helps but if you are going from a 4 gig to a 60 the sustained throughput of the drive is going to jump a huge amount. In addition you're also getting a free disk defrag out of the whole thing.

I'd also say that memory would be the second thing that adds to the "feel" of responsiveness from the PC.

 

[mjolnir2k]

Well, It has been my experience that switching from a 5400 rpm HDD to a 7200 rpm HDD is one of the more practical speed upgrades that I did. It's pretty cost effective to buy a nice 60-120 GB HDD and you will almost certainly see a significant speed increase. Some of my other upgrades (1.4 to a XP2000) have been mostly a "It MUST be faster" kind of a deal.

my .02

-Mj

 

[Stark]

Originally posted by: ai42
I don't think hard drives are slowing down per say. I think that programs (even common stuff like Norton Antivirus etc), are using more and more resources. Which means more and more stuff to transfer off the hard drive. Therefore replacing a hard drive with a newer model provides a great increase in speed due to the much higher transfer speeds off it.

But quite honestly I don't see why people pay up all kinds of cash for a high end CPU/RAM and then slap in a 5400rpm hard drive (which is actually ok for games since maps and most stuff is put into RAM). But a very fast hard drive provides pretty good all around speed.

Well, here's the thing: we can reformat and reload windows all day long and the system will still be slow. The HDD can pass any diagnostic program you throw at it. The system didn't used to be so slow, at least according to the user. When we put a new HDD in, it's suddenly back to snuff. I honestly think that HDDs (especially IDE) do get slower over time. I'm going to do some more experimenting in the next few months.