Hard Drive Fundamentals And Verifying Disk Performance
- by Agnel Kurian
Over the past few months, my Windows XP machine has slowed down to a crawl. It takes about 10-15 minutes to go from power-up to reaching a responsive state. I have reasons to believe that this is a result of the hard disk slowing down. Questions:
Do hard disks slow down as a result of mechanical wear and tear
...or age?
How do I check if my disk has slowed down? Conversely, how can I
verify that my disk is indeed running at the speed it's designed
to run at?
Could drivers be at fault here? Do hard disks come with drivers
or does Windows use a generic driver?
