On 11/06/2011 03:13 PM, David Purton wrote:
Fairly recently - maybe in the last few months - but it's hard to tell, the disk performance has dropped through the floor.
First, make at least two complete back up sets and store one off-site. It could be a hardware problem.Your hard drive manufacturer should have a diagnostic utility available in the form of a bootable ISO image. I'd download, burn, and boot that. If the diagnostic finds a problem, proceed accordingly. Understand that other issues may make a good disk look bad (power supply, power cables, motherboard, controller card, data cable, etc.). If the utility finds no problems, then I'd wipe the disk using the utility, do a fresh install, and then restore/ reconnect data.
As an aside, I use one disk for swap and the root file system, and a second large disk for data. Then whenever I do a fresh install, most restoring data is a simple matter of hooking up the data drive.
HTH, David