Am I experiencing hard drive failure or is it something else?

Question

Hi everyone!
I have a late 2011, 13 inch, 2.4 Ghz macbook pro bought new in 2012 with a 7200RPM HDD option. Ever since I got my computer it seemed slow and sluggish, even with its fresh install. I even re-installed completely after 10.8 came out just to be sure. I did permission checks and repairs from time to time and closely checked what's going on under the hood with the Activity Monitor. Most times the cpu activity was ranging from 2% to 25 % with daily tasks and had over 1 gb RAM (of four) free. I was quite puzzled by the fact that it took 4-5 seconds before I could type my password in when resuming from sleep and by the fact that larger apps (final cut, premiere, etc.) took sometimes over a minute to open. Over time, I got used to it being slow and just dismissed it as a spec thing. I should also mention that I never installed any bogus system speed-up software or interfered with any of the settings.
My unpleasant revelation came when just last week a friend came over with a core2duo 2gb, unibody, 13inch macbook pro bought second hand (stock, no upgrades) and asked me to reinstall MacOS for her. I was absolutely mind boggled as to how her much older machine was running (before I reinstalled) so smoothly and felt so snappy. Her computer was instantly responding to commands and never once did I see the beachball thingy or had any freezes as I replicated my daily activities to test out my theory. Having opened around ten tabs in Chrome and Safari the machine was snappy - a task which would send my 2011 macbook in a 10 second freeze when switching or trying to close one of them.
I'm failing to understand what's going on with my macbook, how can a much under-specced computer run faster and better that my much newer model?
Could I be experiencing a defective hard drive? Is there a way to find out, diagnose my computer?
I was really happy when I finally got my macbook after a whole year's work, and just told myself that maybe this is the way it's suppose to run; actually the experience I wrote above showed me clearly that it's not the case and there definately is something wrong with my macbook. Please help!
Also, I live in the EU but there are no Genius Bars or Apple Stores in my country so I would attempt to self-diagnose first rather than throwing money away at the shameless incompetent scalpers that officially distribute Macs over here.
Cheers

Answer 1

First, back up all data immediately, as your boot drive might be failing.
There are a few other possible causes of generalized slow performance that you can rule out easily.
Reset the System Management Controller.
If you have many image or video files on the Desktop with preview icons, move them to another folder.
If applicable, uncheck all boxes in the iCloud preference pane.
Disconnect all non-essential wired peripherals and remove aftermarket expansion cards, if any.
Check your keychains in Keychain Access for excessively duplicated items.
Boot into Recovery mode, launch Disk Utility, and run Repair Disk.
Otherwise, take the steps below when you notice the problem.
Step 1
Launch the Activity Monitor application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Activity Monitor in the icon grid.
Select the CPU tab of the Activity Monitor window.
Select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected.
Click the heading of the % CPU column in the process table to sort the entries by CPU usage. You may have to click it twice to get the highest value at the top. What is it, and what is the process? Also post the values for % User, % System, and % Idle at the bottom of the window.
Select the System Memory tab. What values are shown in the bottom part of the window for Page outs and Swap used?
Next, select the Disk Activity tab. Post the approximate values shown for Reads in/sec and Writes out/sec (not Reads in and Writes out.)
Step 2
If you have more than one user account, you must be logged in as an administrator to carry out this step.
Launch the Console application in the same way you launched Activity Monitor. Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Select the 50 or so most recent entries in the log. Copy them to the Clipboard (command-C). Paste into a reply to this message (command-V). You're looking for entries at the end of the log, not at the beginning.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Important: Some personal information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting. That should be easy to do if your extract is not too long.