First, be sure your hard drive is the true bottleneck: If you’re using Windows, open Task Manager/More Details and select the Performance tab.
If your hard drive is a truly the bottleneck, you’ll see something like this:
If the problem is the hard drive, you can help by giving it a tune-up.
First, free up space: Uninstall unused apps, delete or archive unimportant files, and take out all the trash — including temp files, old Update files, unneeded log files, and the like. See this for info on Windows’ built-in deep-cleaning tools.
Next, check the hard drive’s physical/logical health. Use your operating system’s tools (e.g. chkdsk, or disk error checking; examples) to verify that the drive’s files are logically intact. Next, check your drive’s physical health via the Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (aka SMART) subsystem built into most current hard drives. Free SMART software can help you do so.
Then, fully Defragment the drive. Defragging ensures that all parts of a given file are physically adjacent on the hard drive, so they can be read by the drive in one smooth, continuous movement — much faster than having the drive heads have to stutter-step all over the place picking up the files’ scattered pieces. A fully-defragged drive should let you access your files at nearly the drive’s theoretical maximum speed.
But if the drive is operating at its max speed, and it’s still too slow for your needs, there’s really nothing else you can do: It’s time to replace the drive.
One option is to install a smaller, more-affordable SSD for just the OS and your most-used files; and to relegate your current drive to secondary-storage status for your least-accessed files — where slight delays in retrieval don’t really matter.
It may be more affordable than you think: As of this writing, you can get a 128GB SSD for US$20-30! (Examples.)
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