Is My Hard Drive Dying?
"Sometimes I hear a clicking sound from my hard drive, but it's only occasionally. Does this mean my hard drive is going to crash soon? Are there any tests I can run to check the health of my hard drive?" |
How Can I Tell If My Hard Drive Is About To Fail?
How long will your hard drive last? Is it giving you subtle signs that a data disaster is looming? How will you know when it's time to buy a new hard drive? Here are some things you can look for. (If your hard drive has already failed, and you came looking for help with that, see my article on Hard Drive Data Recovery.)
Your computer's hard drive is its permanent memory, the critical repository of all your important data, the programs and operating system that make a computer "smart". If the hard drive doesn't work, the whole computer is as useful as a brick. Human memories break down gradually, in most cases, giving ample warning that something needs to be fixed. So how can you tell if your hard drive is close to failing and needs fixing or replacement?
The bad news is that hard drives may give NO warning of imminent failures. Like a tire that runs over a nail, a hard drive most often just dies, leaving you stranded suddenly. The sudden burnout of electronic components; a bearing that blows in a second; a "head crash" in which the read/write head touches and scratches the magnetic platter; these sorts of catastrophes usually happen without warning. Fortunately, they are pretty uncommon.
But don't take chances -- if you don't have a backup plan in place, I strongly advise you to read my article Hard Drives Are Not Forever and get some tips on backing up your hard drive.
The good news is that modern hard drives last a long time. Look on your drive's label or in its technical specs and you will find a value labeled MTBF - Mean Time Between Failures. That's the average (mean) number hours a whole bunch of drives spun at full speed before something broke in each of them. An MTBF of 50,000 hours is the minimum acceptable today; 100,000 hours is not uncommon. There are about 2,000 hours in a typical employee's work-year.
Note that "average" does not mean "guaranteed minimum." An exceptional drive that runs 400,000 hours may be offset in the average calculation by one that burns out after only 5,000 hours - and that early departer could be yours. You just never know. (Did I mention that you should have a backup plan?)
Warning Signs of Hard Drive Failure
If you start getting read/write errors, i.e., "cannot write to disk" or "cannot access file," something is going wrong. It may be the drive's firmware, and downloading the latest firmware update from the manufacturer's site could fix you right up. It may also be corrupted or cross-linked files. Run CHKDSK to find and fix such errors. These are the easiest and cheapest problems to fix.
CHKDSK comes with Windows, and it's pretty good at detecting bad files and physically damaged sectors. It will lock damaged sectors so that the computer will not attempt to write to them. To run CHKDSK, open a command prompt, then type CHKDSK C: /F /R then press Enter. This tells CHKDSK to scan for bad sectors, and fix any errors found. Substitute the "C:" with another drive letter if you have multiple drives (or partitions) and want to check those as well. CHKDSK may ask if you want the scan to be done on the next boot (start up) cycle. If so, respond with Y for yes.
There are free utilities out there that run more thorough tests. One of the highly recommended utilities is Seagate SeaTools for Windows. The Hitachi Drive Fitness Test is another useful tool. Note that you don't have to have a Seagate or Hitachi brand hard drive to use these tools. They'll work with other brands, such as Samsung, Fujitsu, Western Digital, and Maxtor just as well.
Listen to your hard drive. If you hear a clicking sound, especially during startup, that's often a sign of a damaged disk, and impending data doom. Just like you can hear when a car engine is "laboring," you can often hear when a hard drive is working too hard. That means it's wearing out faster, just like an engine that climbs steep hills every day. If you hear vague rattling noises when your hard drive is accessing data, you should run a disk clean-up and defragmentation right away. The less the read/write head must move to find, read, and write data, the longer it will last. See my article How to Clean Up Your Hard Drive.
If noises or errors become frequent, don't hope the problem will go away -- because it won't. Back up all your data and buy a new hard drive. Move everything onto the new drive. Wipe your sensitive data from the old drive using a disk-wiping utility that overwrites every sector so it is very difficult to read what was there. (See Completely Erase Your Hard Drive for help with that.) Then toss the old drive; do not keep it around as an "emergency" drive and do not use it as a secondary drive. You wouldn't count on an old car with a blown engine seal in emergencies or even for backup use, would you?
Do you have comments or questions about hard drive failure? Post your thoughts below...
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Posted by Bob Rankin on 6 Jan 2012
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Most recent comments on "Is My Hard Drive Dying?"
(See all 14 comments for this article.)Posted by:
Carl
06 Jan 2012
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.
Posted by:
Lefty Mills
07 Jan 2012
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.
Posted by:
Supun
07 Jan 2012
Hey Bob,
Thanks for the update.
You can use Norton Disk doctor to detect errors as well.
Posted by:
poppy fogarty
07 Jan 2012
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
Posted by:
DavidTheEngineer
07 Jan 2012
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.
Posted by:
Sheri
07 Jan 2012
I'd like to thank Cliff for the MiniTool Partition recommendation - it looks very good!
Posted by:
Andrea
07 Jan 2012
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.
Posted by:
Gordon
07 Jan 2012
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.
Posted by:
Jon
09 Jan 2012
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
Posted by:
DavidTheEngineer
10 Jan 2012
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.