Get hold of a copy of MHDD (can be found on the Ultimate Boot CD, in the diagnosis part of the HDD section), it will show you how well individual sectors of your drive are performing.
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If you have bad sectors, then the chances are that the drive is also having difficulty reading from a lot of the other sectors, causing it to slow down significantly as it will repeatedly read each sector until it either reads successfully, or times out.
With more modern drives that are manufactured to much higher tolerances, with much higher data densities, bad sectors are much worse than when the largest drives were still less than a GB, because when a damaged area on the surface of the disk grows, it ends up affecting a lot more neighbouring sectors, as they are a lot smaller, and more packed together, than on older drives. Also a bump or pit on the disk surface is more likely to damage the disk heads, as they are a lot closer to the disk surface than they used to be.
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