2 year old HDD super slow

HDD can die after a day or 10 years, its pot luck, you'll just have to persevere and wait for the backup to complete.

+1 and might I add that the brand doesn't matter much. If you want increased reliability get an SSD. No moving parts which is what it sounds like is your problem. They're also much faster and consume MUCH less of your batteries. Personally, I prefer Crucial or Samsung. BTW, you should consider yourself lucky you got any warning. We all learn the backup lesson the hard way.

Just manufacture defects. you can do 1 of two things. Store it away if you don't have something to back it up to. Its better to slave a failing hard drive than to boot from it and copy files over or 2 just keep copying the file that you can. Can you show us a pic of the health status just to see how far its gone?

proceed with the backup. If you check the health tab, you probably have bad sectors on the drive.

I agree with all of the previous responders. Try not to take out your frustration on Toshiba for the failing HDD as they didn't manufacturer it. It is an off the shelf component.

Be patient and let it perform it's backup, then just replace the drive and move on. If a drive is failing, you are best to decommission the drive as soon as is practically possible, and stress it as little as possible in the mean-time. Doing a full read of the drive may stress the ailing portions, depending on the defect, so you don't want to interrupt a backup half-way through and then try it again, especially with the uncertainty of when or if the drive is going to conk out altogether. If you deal with computers long enough, you will see this happen from time to time.

I understand you're being upset about this but I suggest you move on. This could have happened the first day you had the computer. HDDs fail all the time especially in portables. There's nothing you could have done to prevent this except that if you had been doing regular backups you wouldn't have your tit in a wringer right now.

Ok to answer a few things.

1) If its a toshiba hard drive it was made by them and honestly I don't care for them. If you get a new one stick with Western Digital or get a Samsung or Intel SSD. But everyones hard drives dies after a time. Honestly yesterday was my 4th failed hard drive in the past 2 weeks i have had to replace. over a dozen in the past 4 months.

2) You have reallocated sector counts which explains why it is slow. They are not entirely bad sectors. What happens is when you have a sector on the hard drive that it has issues reading and writing too but there is data there it will try to read the data and Relocated it. Once it does it relocates it to a different part on the hard drive. All drives have a Reallocated Area EVEN SSD's. then it just doesn't use that spot anymore and actually maps that bad or failing sector to the new reallocated sector. The one thing people don't know is a true "Bad Sector" is when it is unable to recover the data from that sector. if it can recover it, it reallocates it, and doesn't use the old one. it just doesn't exist. If it can't get the data after so many ties it then marks it as Bad and will always show up. Now it will NOT show up on a surface scan, It won't fully crap out on you quite yet but that explains why its so slow. Not sure why so many reallocated sector counts make it so slow though.

7FF is 2047 reallocated sectors which is A LOT. If a client of mine gets 1 Bad sector i swap them out with a new hard drive then and there. If they have ohhh...more than 300 reallocated sector counts then i swap them out. After 500 they system start to get slow.

If you want to read more about it go here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

But this happens all the time. It just does. Hard drives are ticking time bombs. They can just die out of the blue. Most people have no idea about this stuff happening. I install Crystal Disk Info on all my clients PC's so that they can I can check up on them.

And honestly there is no way to avoid this. Just keep and eye on your SMART status in the future. Also the Average life of a hard drive is about 4 years. Yes i have clients with hard drive with 24/7 usage and have 8 years on them and no issue. I've had hard drive last less than a month (same thing reallocated sector counts) It just happens.

Assuming you have backed up your data and you now wish to find out what happened to your drive, I would use a bootable version of MHDD to perform a full surface scan of your drive. MHDD will identify those sectors which are "slow", ie those that require several retries before they can be read successfully.

If the surface map shows a checkerboard pattern, then this will point to a weak head.