I bought this 7200 RPM SATA laptop drive off Ebay. Seagate Momentus ST9160823AS .

The drive was to replace a 5400 RPM drive that was failing (clicking) on my laptop. That old drive is, I believe , less powerful than this new drive, but it was much larger. 500GB vs 160GB.

Long story short, after MANY attempts to start the old failing drive, I was able to run a drive image backup using Acronic. I then restored that entire image to the new (used) drive. After plugging in and booting, I noticed a major slowdown on system performance. This was even much worse than the old drive (after it would finally bootup).

After tests for bad sectors, etc. I finally gave up, and ran the complete system recovery using the recovery partition I had backed up and restored using Acronis.

Still , after all that, this drive appears to be running very slow. The system simply ran much better before replacement of this new drive. Would there be anything else to consider or check for with this used drive ?According to crystaldiskinfo, this drive has 19000 hours on it! I wonder if it's so heavily used, that it's developed some sort of hard to detect problem? Either that or my image backup with Acronis is causing issues... but I don't see how.

Thanks for any ideas!

Looks like you were sold a lemon, best to return the drive and say its faulty, probably a bad head delaying things. Its allways best to get a brand new drive.