Now, that's not to say that its a hardware issue. But, I've been telling my consumer clients for years that computers have a tendency to "age", meaning that the build on a system tends to slow down as the system advances in age.

Then, I read Robin Harris' blog post today with the same post as this one. According to Robin:

Disk engineers saw a long time ago that they could put more sectors on the outside of a disk platter than on the inside. Once disk microcontrollers got fast enough, it became possible to implement something called Zoned Bit Recording (ZBR) to take advantage of geometry.

ZBR puts more sectors on outer tracks than inner tracks. Adjacent tracks are grouped in zones that all have the same number of sectors. As the zones move closer to the center of the disk, they have fewer sectors...

...The outermost track on a disk has the fastest data rate. The outermost track is also the first place that gets loaded on the disk. So the most valuable disk real estate gets occupied first. As more stuff gets added, you are moving from Boardwalk and Park Place down to Baltic and Mediterranean, i.e. the low-rent district. As you use more disk capacity, the disk gets slower.

The slowdown varies by disk model, but figure the innermost zone is half the data rate of the outermost. Not a big deal for small files, but putting the latest version of Office on a nearly full disk ensures you’ll have a lifetime of slow Office booting.

So, there is a relationship between the age of a system build and its speed, and that age now has a technological reason for its existance. Now, go tell your mother you aren't working any more on her 5-year old computer.

See the full article at: http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=120&tag=nl.e539