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But like you said that is totally dwarfed by SSD.

For what you are wanting to do? Grab a copy of Hiren's Boot CD, specifically you'll want to use HDAT2 or if you are in Windows you can use HDTune and run the error scan.

Well let your old neighborhood PC repairman help ya out with that bud. Here ya go, a little gem called HD Tune which you can install (or put on a flash as a portable if you like) which will not only give you an error scanner but with also give you a full SMART report including ANY changes that have occurred. Quite useful for spotting those problems loooong before they become a problem.

if you'd like it along with many other useful tools you might want to try Kel's CPL Bonus Pack which gives you not only HD Tune but over a dozen great tools right in the Windows CPL, like the HP USB bootable format tool, CPU/GPU-Z, one click driver backup, just a ton of nice features. It works on everything from Win2K-Win 7 X64 BTW, it'll just put them under 32 bit control panel on the X64 OSes but otherwise work perfectly.

And finally if you have a 4Gb or greater flash lying around (and what geek doesn't?) then I'd suggest computer repair utility toolkit v2. Now it is about 2 years old since the FOSS guys had a shitfit and made them take it down, but since this is the net and nothing ever disappears here you go. Simply update the apps and voila! A full toolkit that does just about everything, hardware, software, malware, tweaks, you name it, all with a nice launcher (which is easy to add your own apps to) on a stick.

Anyway i've found with the right tools NO HDD failure should frankly be unexpected...well unless you drop it of course. Otherwise with the above you'll get a heads up weeks in advance which gives you plenty of time to hit Newegg and get a replacement. Enjoy!

Very commonly this happens when a hard drive reverts to PIO mode after Windows decides it has seen a few errors from the drive. You can verify this by looking at the properties of the IDE Controller to which the drive is connected in device manager. (IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers/Primary IDE Channel/Advanced Settings tab, for example)

There is a VBScript that resets the drive back to DMA mode, and is effective if that is indeed the case.

This could also be an early sign of hard drive failure. I've seen plenty of drives that passed diagnostics but were very, very slow. Try checking the SMART data with something like HDTune.

Even brand new drives have errors, that's what error correction is for. There are many diagnostic software packages I'm sure, but something like SpinRite from Gibson Research Corporation will allow you to see the error rates etc. Often a failing hard drive or simply an aging one, will begin having more errors than the correction can keep up with, and you will get a very slow hard drive. This is one possibility of many.

Very commonly this happens when a hard drive reverts to PIO mode after Windows decides it has seen a few errors from the drive. You can verify this by looking at the properties of the IDE Controller to which the drive is connected in device manager. (IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers/Primary IDE Channel/Advanced Settings tab, for example)

There is a VBScript that resets the drive back to DMA mode, and is effective if that is indeed the case.

This could also be an early sign of hard drive failure. I've seen plenty of drives that passed diagnostics but were very, very slow. Try checking the SMART data with something like HDTune.

Hey, going to try this right now. I just took a look and saw that my drive is indeed in PIO mode. I have been having the exact same problems as the OP.

Very commonly this happens when a hard drive reverts to PIO mode after Windows decides it has seen a few errors from the drive. You can verify this by looking at the properties of the IDE Controller to which the drive is connected in device manager. (IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers/Primary IDE Channel/Advanced Settings tab, for example)

There is a VBScript that resets the drive back to DMA mode, and is effective if that is indeed the case.

This could also be an early sign of hard drive failure. I've seen plenty of drives that passed diagnostics but were very, very slow. Try checking the SMART data with something like HDTune.

There are specific SSD's that are not slower than mag platter drives, but the cheap SSD's are slow in their transfer times.

Take an older slower seagate 160gb (taken from hdtune)ST3160827AS at 56.8 MB/sec and a 12.8 ms seek. Even the advertised maximum of a transcend SATA ssd is a read up to 30 MB / sec and a write up to 28 MB / s. The solid state drive is approximately half the speed of the mag platter drive and realistically, less.

It is true that the latency and seek times are incredibly fast on solid state, but it really depends on what your using the drive for whether solid state will work faster for you or not.

A windows user who knows what SMART is could go right ahead and download any one of the dozen free tools available. An Ubuntu user who doesn't know what it is isn't going to be helped out a whole lot by it being there.

HD Tune and Speedfan are among the better utils:

http://www.hdtune.com/
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

That could be because in any two dimensional storage system, as storage density quadruples in two dimensions, it only doubles in one dimension. That means a track on a 40GB platter will only be twice as dense as on a 160GB platter, hence twice as fast given the same rotational speed. As density increases, you'll start to see a curve in the ratio of speed to capacity, not at all unlike this. You can achieve further increases by using multiple platters per drive, but 4 seems to be the limit there, which is why many people use RAID-0 for speed. Of course, the reliability of the array quickly approaches 0 as you add more drives.

Barring increases in rotational speed*, the only way around the speed problem seems to be solid state storage, but that's currently much slower than hard drive speed, and nonvolatile RAM won't catch up for a while, if ever.

* Increasing rotational speed means you need very high quality components manufactured to very tight tolerances, which increases the cost substantially.