Do HD's slow down over time?

[B12]

Even if they are fairly fast 7200rpm drives with the usual 8mb cache?

I had 4 HD's in my system, 2 x 80 GB WD 8mb 7200 drives, 1 x 120 GB 8mb Maxtor 7200 drive and 1 x 250 GB 8mb WD 7200 drive, all SATA, but they are all getting on in years now.

I was running out of disk space, so bought a new IBM Hitachi Deskstar 40GB Deskstar 7200, yep, 5 HD's now, and installed it on the IDE cable as master and my DVD burner as slave, started to back up data to it , and its so quick, dont need benchmarks to tell me this, I'd tried shuffeling files around before this drive arrived because i knew I was out of space and it took ages, but the moving of data to this cheap drive was amazingly quick, its brand new though ... so have my older hard drives slowed down with age or was i wasting my time with SATA before?

 

[B12]

I really meant a general type question.

My Laptop HD is showing signs of death with occasional groaning, but like other HD's i don't monitor its health every day with benchmarks.

I was just wondering if anyone had observed if HD performance deteriorated over time?

This brand new IDE HD is noticeably quicker over my older 2 to 3 year old SATA 1 drives for data transfer.

Do HD's get slower with age, other machinery with moving parts do.

 

[B12]

Sounds reasonable ... unless there is a difference in the way drives access and transfer data?

Noticeable difference though, will have to try that benchmark program.