Is my HDD failing?

[deltaforce]

Hello folks,

Sounds like a generic question but not for me.

About 3 months ago, HDD made weird sounds as if it was failing. I immediately took whole HDD backup, did some basic cleaning of the data and it was all fine. No problem for 3 months.

Yesterday, all of a sudden, it took LONG time to access data on HDD or to uninstall small programs. The laptop was slow as a Snell. Again, another backup and now today, all looks fine but a program that I use for my work (Papers2, mekentosj.com) , keeps crashing. No weird HDD sounds whatsoever.

I have no idea is these are indications of a failing HDD. Can anyone give me some pointers on tests I can perform to check it? or do you just suggest me to spend $100 and get a new HDD?

BONUS question, This is Acer Aspire 5740 laptop with i3-330M processor and 3GB of RAM. I was planning to upgrade RAM to 8GB anyways. This laptop is about 4 years old and in rather decent condition. The battery life is only about 90 minutes. Would you spend $150 on an upgrade or just get a new machine? I am a grad student in Genetics, I do not use any memory hogging programs, but Photoshop and Illustrator at a times.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Steltek]

Go to Device Manager and click on the Disk Drives section to see who made the hard drive (i.e. Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi, Fujitsu, etc). You should be able to download a utility from the support website of the drive manufacturer to test the drive.

I wouldn't answer the upgrade question until you know whether the hard drive is defective, or if there is some other hardware failure going on.

 

[T_Yamamoto]

Wouldn't upgrade. Your OS can only handle 3.5gb probably because its 32bit.

 

[deltaforce]

Go to Device Manager and click on the Disk Drives section to see who made the hard drive (i.e. Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi, Fujitsu, etc). You should be able to download a utility from the support website of the drive manufacturer to test the drive.

I have Hitachi Drive and I tried to run Hitachi Drive Fitness Test but it is not designed to run on primary operating drive. In my case, I have only one HDD in laptop and hence it won't run. Actually, it won't even show any HDDs after a scan.

I ran WDs Data Lifeguard diagnostic test, both quick and long one. It passed in both the tests.

The Laptop is now REALLY REALLY slow. It takes about 5 minutes to fire up Chrome...

Any other leads?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Wali]

I'm by no means an expert, but it likely wouldn't hurt to also check for non-hardware-relared causes. If you managed to back up your entire data several times without any read failures, and now Chrome specifically is causing issues, it could be time to find a support forum for hijackthis.

Unless the problem is very specific or easy to trace, I'd always try to rule out software and malware issues first. Some malware is definitely capable of causing odd HD-behaviour, too.

Please excuse me if you already had that idea yourself, and best of luck with fixing your laptop!

 

[Torn Mind]

I'm by no means an expert, but it likely wouldn't hurt to also check for non-hardware-relared causes. If you managed to back up your entire data several times without any read failures, and now Chrome specifically is causing issues, it could be time to find a support forum for hijackthis.

Unless the problem is very specific or easy to trace, I'd always try to rule out software and malware issues first. Some malware is definitely capable of causing odd HD-behaviour, too.

Please excuse me if you already had that idea yourself, and best of luck with fixing your laptop!

That is a good suggestion
Yes, malware might be the issue. The best forums for malware removal seems to be bleepingcomputer.com forums.

Also, there are hardware diagnostic tools and scanners to see if bad sectors are popping up in your hard drive.