Terrible copy speed on laptop hdd

GM2015

My laptop drive has a terrible copy speed lately. It's a 320gb hdd from stock acer aspire 5736z. I received it in 2010 and no major problem with it. It had a couple of OS reinstalls.
It's the only drive inside the laptop.

Copying to external drives are faster than internal copy.

Currently running winblows 7 ult., separated to drive C and D, 70GB and 228GB respectively. Copying to C to D is terrible. A week ago my Dropbox folder went with 700 KB/s! What the duck.

7zip compessed a folder of thousands of images to be encrypted with a write speed of around 1,5MB/s.

So I'm gonna ask the obvious, are these signs of the drive dying?

Bochi

Check the SMART values of your drive, that might give you some hints about what's going on.
As you said you are on a Windows machine: http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

dediserve

Assuming it's a generic laptop drive, you should still see 20-40MBsec

CoastHosting

are there any obvious noises coming from the hard drive? other then the standard spindle?

TarZZ92

dediserve said: Assuming it's a generic laptop drive, you should still see 20-40MBsec

if it's next to dead that is... and laptop hard drives are about 80-120MB these days.. 20-40MB in IDE days. this laptop is sata

dediserve

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-2.5-mobile-hard-drive-charts/h2benchw-3.12-Avg-Read-Throughput,1110.html

A low end 2009 HDD is closer to 30MB tho. Maybe time to pop an SSD in that sucker!

GM2015

No, same voice as years ago as I can remember. But I'm getting old.

davenz said: are there any obvious noises coming from the hard drive? other then the standard spindle?

dragon2611

@dediserve said:
Assuming it's a generic laptop drive, you should still see 20-40MBsec

Unlikely as the OP is copying from One partition on the drive to another partition on the same drive which will be causing it to seek excessively as it read/writes the data. The initial transfer speed might be quite quick if the OS has enough RAM available to cache the contents between read/writing but once the amount of Free RAM available for caching drops then the performance will nosedive off a cliff.