hard drive failing?

i have an aspire 5755-6832 that is experiencing extremely slow performance at times. the hard drive LED lights up and stays on for anywhere from a half hour to an hour. perf-mon doesnt show a lot of traffic on the drive at these times but the machine is pretty much un-useable until the drive activity drops to 0, then its ok for a while. i have a recent backup so i decided to use the recovery DvDs and replace the C: partition. after doing that i ran a disk check, then after that i ran a defrag to see what kind of performance i would get. with a fresh install of the OS and the drive 1% fragmented, the defrag took over an hour.

today while installing some software the computer is still going into spasms randomly where it lags to the point of not being able to use the keyboard, resize windows, etc...

i'm out of warranty with this machine and i will probably throw a solid state hard drive in if it is indeed the drive that is failing. before doing that i want to make sure that it isnt an I/O controller problem, or other mainboard problem.

any hints?

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Tommy-Acer

Without running it through some in-house diagnostics, there's not a reliable way to diagnose your issue on a forum.

If you have an extra hard drive lying around, it wouldn't hurt to attempt the replacement just to see if that is the issue.

Jahmbo

i dont have a spare 2.5 but i do have a rig that allows me to connect the 2.5 via usb to another pc.

ran crystaldiskinfo and got an error, dont remember offhand which one, so i ran the WD diagnostics and it passed the smart test but failed the extended test with too many bad clusters.

i have the drive connected to another pc right now, blew away the partition and am doing a full format so i can do more tests, i will probably be throwing a solid state drive in anyway, but just for curiosity sake i want to see if the drive is toast.