Best OS for slow drive pc?

[Gilles P]

Hi everyone,
So I have a laptop i'd like to use, it's nothing extraordinary, but not such an under-powered laptop, it has a core i3 a little over 2 GHz, i don't remember exactly, 4Gb of ram and a little graphics card, but the hard drive is pretty slow. Everything took a few moments on windows 7, so i installed Linux Mint cinnamon... Everything still took a few seconds to launch like just opening a browser or such.
So do you guys know a pretty light Linux OS (still only an i3 and 4 gigs) that has a pretty low hard drive usage. I thought about puppy Os but it lacks quite some features.

 

[The_Man12]

Okay how long does it take for something to launch? If it's just 2 seconds then that's normal, be patient man lol. I have a laptop that has around the same specs as yours and it runs fine. Go on device manager and look for the HDD model and then post it on here. If you think there's something wrong with the hard drive then you could download CrystalDisk and see what it says. Or you could also upgrade to an SSD. Anyway, back to the point; I personally really like LinuxMint and OpenSUSE. You could also try Ubuntu.

 

[Gilles P]

Okay how long does it take for something to launch? If it's just 2 seconds then that's normal, be patient man lol. I have a laptop that has around the same specs as yours and it runs fine. Go on device manager and look for the HDD model and then post it on here. If you think there's something wrong with the hard drive then you could download CrystalDisk and see what it says. Or you could also upgrade to an SSD. Anyway, back to the point; I personally really like LinuxMint and OpenSUSE. You could also try Ubuntu.

well yes it's not really slow, like between 3 and 5 seconds for a blank page in the browser to load, just seems much slower than my main pc, i tryed crystaldisk before, it xas somewhere around 40MB/s in sequential and i think it was something like 0.9 random 4k reads

 

[The_Man12]

Think you can post a picture? 40 MB/s is on the low side. How old is the HDD? Is it even SATA 3?

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Gilles P,

What is the model of the drive?

It's good that you've done some benchmark tests. Yet, I believe the results for sequential are kind of low.
Can you test the drive with a tool that can provide a SMART report? Look for pending/reallocated and uncorrectable sectors.

Let us know how this goes,
D_Know_WD

 

[Gilles P]

Think you can post a picture? 40 MB/s is on the low side. How old is the HDD? Is it even SATA 3?

yes it's pretty old i don't know exactly how olf that laptop is, but it is sata 2... although sata2 should give me up to 300MB/s ... so that shouldn't be bottlenecking all of that, also, sorry for setting this as an answer, my mistake

 

[D_Know_WD]

It doesn't really matter that the drive is SATA 2.

As I have already mentioned, you drive could be failing. You need to test it and see if there are some abnormal values in the SMART report: http/www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[Gilles P]

It doesn't really matter that the drive is SATA 2.

As I have already mentioned, you drive could be failing. You need to test it and see if there are some abnormal values in the SMART report: http/www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

i'll try the second program in a few hours, i've tried to run cristaldisk mark again, it totally glitched out, like over 1000 MB/s so yeah... but i allready did this, idk if it really is usefull :

 

[The_Man12]

Think you can try with another hard drive you may have lying around? That hard drive is also not very fast, 5400 RPM and 8MB cache, but it isn't supposed to be that slow.

 

[Gilles P]

Think you can try with another hard drive you may have lying around? That hard drive is also not very fast, 5400 RPM and 8MB cache, but it isn't supposed to be that slow.

yes , that was wat i was thinking, those speeds do look a bit low so...