600m HD dying? Not sure

Hi. I have a 2 year old Dell 600m. Lately, I've been noticing that my hard drive seemed to be acting slow: a lot of programs were loading really slowly, my computer was getting laggy in general, and the HD indicator seemed to be constantly lit when the computer was acting laggy. I just ran HDTune to see if I could figure out what was happening. HDTune told me that there were no errors, but the benchmark looked really sketchy:



It's a Hitachi 80g 5400 hard drive, if that matters. I guess my question is, is my hard drive dying?

 

When is the last time you defragmented the hard disk or did a clean installation of Windows after formatting? Most hard disk performance issues are related to disk fragmentation.

 

I reformatted last summer, but I defragmented just a week ago. Didn't notice an improvement. Also, disk usage is at around 70%, could that be the problem?

 

I think there two possibilities :
1 )The same thing that PhoenixFX said.
2 )Your hard-drive might be in PIO mode.Go to the BIOS setup and see whether the hard-drive is set to PIO or DMA.it should be on DMA.Also check it in the Device Manager->the IDE controller.

 

If it is not a fragmentation issue then check the DMA mode as mujtaba pointed out.
It could also be due to running lots of background applications without enough RAM, which will force Windows to heavily rely on the swap file for memory (therefore continues HDD access) making everything else slow.

 

I honestly doubt that the HDD is going. Normally if you see a bunch of errors, hear sounds, not turning on, etc - that might point to HDD problem. I would go with Phoenix suggestion, and format. Think of it as spring cleaning.

If you have installed several programs since you formatted, chances are those programs are running in the background. When you press CTRL+ALT+DEL to go to the task manager, your processes should be in the 30-40. No more than 50. The higher number of processes, the more lag and slow boot up time you will have.