Hard drive failure

A few years back when I went to Windows 10, the PC seemed to run a bit slower. I sort of expected that, a W10 was bigger and took longer to do stuff.  It's been like that since Windows 3.1; a more cynical person might claim that it was a deliberate ploy between Intel and Microsoft to increase sales?

This got worse and worse, with disc usage being really high. Damn Windows. I eventually bought a SSD (Evo 750 256G) about a year ago. I installed it along side the HDD and it just sat there for storage. Well, the PC certainly speeded up. 

However, this latest Fall Creator's edition seemed to slow everything down again, particularly start up and shut down. I didnt think any more of it until I decided to clean the HDD and remove it. It was taking over an hour to move 100M bytes. I found the usual whining about how Windows 10 was the worst ever, and its disc access was so slow. I'd already tried all the solutions in the past, so quickly skipped to new solutions. There weren't any, just the odd post about impending HDD failure, which fitted with my observation; the drive would read data fine, then drop to 0B/s for 30s, then read ok. Windows disc manager showed it was OK. Another utility showed reallocated sector count is 1992. It's a 500G, so that's a lot of storage gone. I've had it for 5 years and manufactured 6 years ago.

This is my first personal HDD failure; I've owned about 15 HDD, the first costing over £100 for a 1.3GB in ~1993 (you can get around 4TB for £100 now, and it's a lot faster) I remember copying a CD onto it and having half left; but this was when Windows only took a few MB. I've also had one fail at work in 2006.  It turned into a proper coffee grinder. The support staff didn't know what a HDD failure was, so that tells you how uncommon failures are; they supported about 1500 PCs.

Now the disc is out of the PC, it's running a lot faster. I imagine Windows was updating the drive status on the HDD which was taking a long time to complete.