Is My Hard Drive Dying?

Bob~
Like your automotive analogizes.
We use Hard Disk Sentinel to monitor our drive health.
It has saved us a lot of crashes.
When it detects problems, we replace the dying drive by cloning with MiniTool Partition (free).

I had a Seagate hard drive whose firmware corrupted and couldn't be fixed. Fortunately I have been doing backups for a year or two and was able to install a new drive and load the contents of the back up drive giving me my computer back.

Thankfully the hard drive was under warranty and Seagate repaired it. I wouldn't hesitate to use it if I didn't have a replacement at least until I purchased a new one. In fact, looking at the cost of new hard drives, I might decide to use it for awhile hoping that prices will come down.

Also Seagate has shortened the length of their warranty's which means either that their products are not as reliable or they have a chance to reduce business costs during the current economic malaise.

As an over the hill ex computer consultant I need to depend on your information often to bring me up to date. I also recommend you to my friends.
You say it often in different ways but the biggest lesson all users should follow is backup and also do a backup off site.

Great program. Keep them coming.

I don't bother to wipe my failed drives. One or two blows with a 22 oz. framing hammer does the job.

Make sure it is your hard drive making the noise. Those pesky (but necessary) cooling fans can start to make terrible noise at startup which goes away after a few minutes.
BUT then don't assume its only your fan.

The Puppy Linux operating system will run with a broken hard drive. You can boot from a CD or a USB. And it's free.

Hey Bob,
Thanks for the update.
You can use Norton Disk doctor to detect errors as well.

Bob, have read the article re hard drive failure.I have an Imac leopard and wonder if there is an equivalent CHKDSK for it. My mac has been playing up a litte, mainly crashing to a dark blue screen when
I sometimes click on a link. Not sure if this is anything to worry about, but as I am a senior and not that technically minded wondered if you could advise.
Many thanks
Poppy

For exactly that reason, I only buy reputable brands (Western Digital or Seagate)commercial-grade models; they are only a little bit more expensive.

To my knowledge, almost all reputable vendors have included S.M.A.R.T. technology in their drives for the last few years. S.M.A.R.T. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.) provides reports on the speed, buffering, reseeks, any errors, etc. and will warn the O/S when things fall below minimum spec. For the curious, there are lots of utilities that will monitor S.M.A.R.T. information, and I'm pretty sure Windows 7 can read it natively. By the way, Western Digital drives are almost all spec'd at MTBF >1,000,000 hrs, 500 years at 40 hrs/wk. or more than 100 years 24/7. Western Digital also provides a free downloadable Acronis Backup utility that will run on any computer with a WD drive. It has almost all of the function of the full product ~$100.

Of course, S.M.A.R.T. cannot predict when you will drop your laptop and cause a head crash that wipes out your HD, so back up anyway. Some of the better drives have features to mitigate the damage of a shock, and any good laptop will have HD mechanical and electronic shock prevention. As usual, you get what you pay for.

I'd like to thank Cliff for the MiniTool Partition recommendation - it looks very good!

Just about all of the hard drive manufacturers are now reducing the length of their warranties, and this is due to the flooding in Thailand of all the mfr's factories. They claim they're reducing warranty times to reduce costs, since the flooding is causing so much financial loss.

However, I became quite skeptical of of this warranty shortening "due to financial reasons". The very first thing I thought of when I read about this was what is going to happen to all the flooded parts? I just wonder if these companies will try to salvage their inventories at all. You know, try to salvage something that's been water damaged and sell it. It makes me suspicious they are reducing warranties perhaps because of this. I know this has happened to cars in the past, they were flooded overseas, then unknowing consumers bought a brand new car, only to find out later it had been previously water damaged.

I had to replace my Western Digital 350 GB drive in my iMac recently and I am wondering if died because (inadvertently) I ran the machine for some weeks on a practically saturated drive - which I know is not the done thing. It was just 2 years old - so could you confirm if I was at least partially (or even totally) responsible for 'suffocating' my disk to death?
I do not anticipate having similar problems in the future because I replaced it with a 2TB disk, so I guess I can relax for a while.

EDITOR'S NOTE: I don't think there's much (if any) correlation between a very full drive and drive failure. Disk access might be slower, especially if it was badly fragmented. But I don't believe that could kill the drive.

Isn't there a (fairly expensive) hdd recovery kit wherein you dismantle the hdd and place the platters on the kit's platter reader? I thought there was something like that for about $3,000 (US).

-Jon

Jon:
There are services that can recover a lot of your hard drive data. It's not something you can do yourself, it requires a white room, specialized tools, and custom software. There are companies that specialize in it: take your HD, remove and remount the platters, copy any intelligible data onto a stack of DVDs. You can find them online, or most of the computer retailers will have a contract with one of these data recovery companies. You can take your HDD to their In-Store tech services such as the Best Buy Geek Squad, who will take payment, ship it to the recovery company, and return your DVDs. The retail route is more convenient to be sure, and may not cost any more. Oh yes, it is expensive. Your figure of $3000 is about right, whether you go direct or through a retailer.

Note: this is not an endorsement of Best Buy or Geek Squad; that's just an example. All the retailers have something like it, and most of them will be smart enough to offer the service.

Really not much you can do after the fact. Nothing is as good as a recent backup. I've seen, my mother's disk die, my wife's disk die and my own hard disk die. I was really lucky for my mother's and wife's drive, new disk and re-install of Windows, the damaged disk could not be read. Plugged it into my Mac, and the files were all there. Burned a DVD with their files and gave them the DVD. For me, I have a Mac and multiple Time Machine backups. One is at work and one is at home. This gives me two shots at recovering. Simply replaced the hard disk and I was asked if I wanted a Time Machine restore. My machine was back in the state I last had a backup, only lost the e-mail I was writing at the time.

So, if your hard disk dies and you have only old backups, get a case for you disk and try it withe someone with a different OS. It might work, or at least work where you can copy off the files. If you have no luck and no other recourse, then be prepared for $3000. You also will not be able to chose what is recovered, any thing they can recover, they will. They will even get back some deleted files.

The 3 things to know about hard disk failures: 1. backup, 2. backup, 3. backup. It will fail someday and inevitably on a really critical time.

I have two hard drives. The master has to be cloned. Can I clone the master to the slave? If so how? Can I than clean up the master and clone it using the slave?