A friend of mine reached out because his PC is really slow and takes over an hour to boot. He has a 1TB HDD for files and some games, while the OS is on a 256GB NVMe SSD. The HDD is partitioned into two 500GB sections. His specs are as follows: 500W power supply, 16GB DDR4 RAM, an Intel i5-9600KF processor, and an RTX 2070 Super. After checking, I found that the HDD was constantly at 100% active time. Accessing anything on that drive takes forever, and the desktop icons take ages to load. I attempted a virus scan but had to stop it after 30 hours because it wasn't progressing. After disabling the HDD in the device manager, the boot time dropped to just a few seconds. What can we try to fix this without resorting to reformatting, and how can we check if it's a hardware issue that means the drive needs replacement?
4 Answers
Yeah, it really sounds like that HDD is dying. The computer is probably struggling to read from it, and that's what's slowing everything down.
It sounds like the HDD might have a lot of bad sectors, which is likely causing the slowdown. Your friend should definitely consider replacing it soon.
Sounds like the hard drive is on its last legs. The system's trying to correct the errors but can’t keep up anymore. It's best to back up the data and think about getting a new HDD or an SSD.
Did you check the startup programs? Also, ensure no drive is more than 70% full, as that can cause similar issues. Keeping drives less congested helps performance!
I actually made sure all of the drives were under 70% full and deactivated unnecessary startup programs via the task manager.