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?

 

[MetA]

SATA versus SATA II ?

On-board cache ? seek speed ??

No, they don't "slow down" but if they do start gettign bad sectors then if it's in a bad area you can find *** disk re-seeks a big delay. Do a low level format to remove those.

 

[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.

 

[EffBee]

There would be a slowdown in the sense that a new empty drive is storing data sequentially whereas an older drive will have file fragmentation issues.

Unless you have defragged a lot lately.

If the drive is not reading/writing sequentially then random accesss will comparatively make the older drive seem a lot slower.

Bad sectors aside I have never seen this issue raised before so it seems like a pioneering question to me.

Interesting though - if true that drives slow down with age I will need to stop using drives till they die - and they don't die often, they just keep going.

 

[rpstewart]

There's something not right here. If you can move data onto the new drive at, say, 50Mb/s then the source drive must be supplying the data at that rate so that suggests there's nothing wrong with the SATA drive that's supplying the data.

I suggest you go and run HDTach on all your drives first and see if there's one which is noticeably slower than the rest and start from there.

 

[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.