How to find the spec of my harddrive

[hwlurker]

I think my hardrive is slow as my computer slows down when it tries to do anything with hard-drive...its about 3-4 yrs old.
I was considering replacing harddrive first and later rest..

Before replacing i wanted to check the spec of my harddrive.
Is there a way to check the speed and any other information of my harddrive.

Via system properties..i could only find that manufacturer is SATA..nothing else
Any ideas??

[Kov-Ice]

Welcome to PCMech. Go to www.google.com and search for HDSpeed.exe It's a free program that will give you the transfer speed of your drive. I think AIDA32 is a good multipurpose diagnostic tool. You can get that HERE

[Panama Red]

You can do an online test of any brand hard drive at the Western Digital site. It will tell you complete drive info when test is complete. Here's a link if you're interested.

http://support.wdc.com/dlg/onlinedlg.asp

[hwlurker]

Thanks, the AIDA32 program worked great, turned out its a quantum frieball lct20 drive with rpm of 4500 and average seek of 12ms - actually not a bad drive...

Now got to look if its worth to replace this 40GB drive 4500rpm with 7500rpm drive...thanks for all the infor guys.

[glc]

4500 or 5400? Either way, by today's standards, that's a slow drive. If you replace it with a 7200 rpm 8mb cache drive *and* an Ultra ATA controller card with 80 wire cable, the speed will be noticeably faster.

Have you done a scandisk and a defrag recently? If not, it can only help. It's possible that the drive is beginning to fail, Quantums have a tendency to develop bad sectors and flaky controller chips when they get a few years old.

[hwlurker]

its 4500..I have tried to run defrag couple of times in last few weeks..and gets no where.

First when i start defrag, the harddrive looks like doing work, but nothing its always 0% even after couple of hours...and when i try to see more detail, it doesn't show anything like how many fragments are there and how they are layed out...any ideas..

[Panama Red]

Have you tried to run Defrag in Safe Mode? That's the best way with a dos based os. Best to run scandisk first as glc suggested. You can run either from Safe. Just hit F8 at startup screen and it should give you the option to boot to safe.