Slowest hard drive ever?

[mharb]

Im helping this lady my Mom knows with her slow laptop by cleaning it up-

cleaning registry, unused/unwanted apps, background apps, updating windows/drivers, defragging, etc. I found that even after resetting windows it was still slow, and I thinks it’s because of the disk usage. don't know a ton about storage but I’m 99% sure that these speeds are unfathomably terrible. 

[Aibakins]

If she is willing to pay for a SSD, just replace it. I have not found a single computer that doesnt become slow after 2 years with a hard drive.

[Bitter]

I'll 2nd the SSD, even on old old systems it makes an absolutely massive difference. I updated my moms laptop with one and her words 'I've never used a computer this fast before'...and it's a 1st gen i5 Dell laptop.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

Nah the slowest hard drive would technically be one that isn't working at all. 

 

On a serious note, to add onto what everyone else has said, given this is for an old lady who's not going to be doing huge file transfers, even a DRAMless SSD would run circles around that HDD in most cases. 

[TetraSky]

I used to have a seagate drive that went from 150MB/s, to 100MB/s, to 50MB/s and to 10MB/s before finally dying within 5 years of purchase.

 

Also, it might have some stuff running in the background that isn't visible in Task Manager. Boot into Safe mode and see if it's just as bad.

[kirashi]

23 minutes ago, mharb said:

Im helping this lady my Mom knows with her slow laptop by cleaning it up-

cleaning registry, unused/unwanted apps, background apps, updating windows/drivers, defragging, etc. I found that even after resetting windows it was still slow, and I thinks it’s because of the disk usage. don't know a ton about storage but I’m 99% sure that these speeds are unfathomably terrible. 

If that machine has a spinning rust disk (HDD), it's going to experience bouts of 100% disk usage resulting in sluggish performance when running any modern OS. Solution is to replace the HDD with an SSD, even if it's only a SATA based drive.

[cmndr]

As stated, SSDs are the way...

Modern windows kind of just assumes an SSD is in place. A harddrive, that can do ~200 or so operations a second can't keep pace with windows asking it to do a few thousand.

For perspective, the fastest of SSDs can do on the order of 1 million IOPs.

Even a "slow" SSD will be night/day.