Laptop hardrive seems slow

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About a week ago I brought my laptop to a friend's house. I didn't thrash it around while driving, the only thing I could think of that could have damaged it, was overnight I sat the laptop on it's side instead of on it's base. It was on it's side the entire night but it wasn't kicked around or anything. Since then, my hardrive just seems to be slower than normal. Accessing things takes up more time, during games when normally the hardrive would load levels seems to take longer, and I get more lag during hard drive stressed things than before.
I don't have a spare laptop hard drive to test on, so I was wondering if there is a good hard drive testing program that can make sure nothing's damaged on it. Also, I don't hear any grinding sounds of physical damage.

I did all the normal maintanence like defragging, spyware/virus checking, etc... but nothing's coming up suspicious. I've considered reformatting/reinstalling Windows, but I would like it to not come to that.

Here's a screenshot of my hard drive's HD Tach. I think the downward spikes have something to do with the performance:

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TTT

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Bump

[Efflixi]

That seems perfectly normal for a functioning 5400rpm laptop drive.

2.5" drives are never as fast as their desktop brethren.

[Artesial]

Originally Posted by Efflixi

That seems perfectly normal for a functioning 5400rpm laptop drive.

2.5" drives are never as fast as their desktop brethren.

But it seemed a good bit faster two weeks ago...

[sheerdark]

your major problem is that you are basing your problem off what "seems" to be true. Thus, we cannot help you with your perceptions of reality, only tell you that everything seems okay, transfer wise. You have no graph from before to compare to, so you can't prove that anything has slowed down...

[ERL857]

if your that concerned backup stat and run some diag tests on it