By Martin Jansen, Owner of Jansen-PCINFO
A friend at Christmas Stars told me about his problems with his PC. The response times on his hard drive were slow, too slow to work properly. This is a sign that either the controller or hard drive itself is failing.
The biggest problem is the possible loss of data. He had a 1TB drive in the computer and had ordered a 1TB thumb drive in hopes of cloning the drive.
I think that is a terrible idea. Thumb drives fail regularly under stress and he would double his work by having to clone the image to another hard drive or solid state drive.
The better solution is to order a 1TB solid state drive and an enclosure like this one on Amazon.
Similar sized drives are easily cloned using free software like Clonezilla Live.
Once the cloning is complete, he would open the case of the computer and replace the hard drive with the cloned solid state drive.
Now if the controller is failing, he may have bigger problems. He could try a different SATA port or a SATA Adapter in a desktop, but it may mean that the motherboard is failing. If so, another computer may be in his future.