Do hard drive performance degrade over time?

[LOST TALE]

I mean does it degrade in some way overtime, ( I know it randomly dies someday)

[naca1227]

I'm not sure.

I know it does if you never defrag it.

[renz62]

I guess it does over time... my first HDD 5 years ago died 5 months ago.

[NoahPCFreak]

Modern hard drives will continue to perform pretty reliably and to new specifications for a period of three to five years at a minimum.

[Altecice]

Yup just make sure to defrag your HDD every so often to keep it performing at its peak.

[DAGEEK]

it depend whether you have an ssd or hdd

[LOST TALE]

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211596

is this a good SSD deal?

or should I wait for better saving options

[alpenwasser]

The physical performance of an HDD should not degrade over time

(at least not noticeably) and once it starts to have performance

issues on the hardware side you really should replace it because

it's probably about to die.

EDIT:

That does not mean that HDDs do not age. In fact, old age is the

most reliable indicator of when an HDD is about to die.

But performance shouldn't degrade proportionally with a disk's age.

Only at the very end of a disk's life when there can possibly

be lots of bad sectors would I expect a noticeable performance

decrease.

Source (pdf): http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf

/EDIT

However, your file system performance (which is what you

will usually notice unless you do benchmarks on the naked disk

without a file system on it) can degrade over time (mostly due

to fragmentation, as mentioned above), although this differs

somewhat between file systems. This can be countered by doing

defragmentation on the file system. Some FS do this on their

own I think, on others you need to do this manually.

For SSDs, actual drive performance can indeed decrease over time

from what I've heard, depending on many factors.

[voaz]

They certainly do.

[IdeaStormer]

They certainly do.

 

Proof/source link please.

 

Assuming the drive is still good (no bad sectors or overheated past its rated temps or mistreated as in dropped) the drive goes on as it did on day one. Who the heck just throws drives away after so much time has passed?

[monkfish101]

ok. So what makes a PC slow down over time? I have just reformatted a Windows PC at work which was so slow it was almost unusable. Fresh install of Win 7 - but still slow. Click on windows explorer and you are talking about 5 to 10 seconds before it opens up.

 

This PC is a Lenovo ThinkCentre i5 4gig of ram 64bit. Loads of hard disk space. Nothing installed software wise.

 

The hard drive is the only moving part apart from the fans. So why would it slow down over 3 to 4 years use? Surely it has to be that the hard drive performance has degraded.