mikey71 said:
My hard drive has a read speed of 2.7 MB/sec
These "disk benchmark" figures are often wrong. Caching, block size, fragmentation and background disk usage throw off many drive benchmark utilities and give fantastically wrong results. If your drive was really working at about 2.7 MB/sec, it would probably take you 5 minutes to load Windows.
No I need to replace my hdd or can i tweak it in some way?
Let's explore what you can do to improve your woeful benchmark figures (assuming they are correct). The first thing is
to ensure DMA mode is enabled, not PIO. The second thing would be to update your
chipset drivers, which vary depending on your system platform. There's honestly not a lot left you can do.
Seagate gives a figure of > 36MB/sec!!!
Which is actually somewhat generous. At 4200 RPM, it is probably even less.
This is not unusual given the cramped conditions of laptop hard drives. Drives are rated to operate in even higher temperatures, but it gives me the jitters to see such high temps on a HDD. This could be a sign that you laptop needs some cleaning out... The ventiliation holes may be clogged up with some dust bunnies. This is just probably due to poor air circulation though, as laptop manufacturers apparently don't care about your data.
Will running a low level format fix the problem?
Most likely not.[/quote]
My drive is a Seagate Momentus 42.
This drive isn't exactly a record breaker, but it should be benchmarking 10x what you're getting. Try HD Tach for a second opinion, if you aren't already using it.