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Can a damaged hard drive slow down a computer? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by NONE_dc@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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My mother's laptop has been running as fast as a turtle on a snail going uphill for a long time now. Everything has been done to it, including formatting it and installing another, less cumbersome OS, but nothing improves. I have an HHD available, I have done some tests and it does work.

Would changing the hard drive do any good?

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[–] someguy3@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Aren't these sectors detected and blocked when you format and install a new os?

[–] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 2 points 6 months ago

Sectors that cannot be read reliably will get marked out, but I've seen plenty of HDDs that tested fine but still had obvious issues when reading data from certain areas. If your OS happens to be within that area then it becomes a problem very quickly, and you'll probably lose data before the drive marks those sectors as bad.

[–] Gurfaild@feddit.de 1 points 6 months ago

Older OSes did that, but modern ones usually just do the equivalent of format /q in DOS (write new filesystem metadata only, don't check for bad sectors)