Asklemmy

43755 readers

1252 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

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

20 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] 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)