In today’s digital world, every one of us owns precious files like personal documents, photos, videos, or audio files, which are typically stored on hard drives. Only a handful of people realize that most electronic storage devices, including hard drives, have a rather limited lifetime when compared to the ancient ways of storing information, such as stone, papyrus, paper, or old school records. The average lifetime of a stationary hard drive today is around 4 – 7 years on standard use, though other factors are too considered like the type and its manufacturer, and it rapidly declines if the drive is subject to strong variations in temperature, humidity, and motion as in not being stationary.

A lot of people today own laptops, some external hard drives, which get dragged around quite a bit, a realistic hard drive lifetime is extremely short time to reliably store important data.

On a long run, hard drives naturally gradually fail, during this depreciation whereas giving you the chance to react i.e to backup your data, and replace the storage device before facing a fatal failure. There are a host of signs that hint to a gradual failure of your hard drive.

What Is A Crashed/Failed Hard Drive?

Failed hard drive A lot of times people will ask, “What does it mean when someone tells me that my hard drive crashed, or my hard drive is dead?”– We hear that phrase all the time and, to be honest, I’ve heard it used for a few different scenarios:

Hard drive crash is when your hard drive physically stops working, it can also refer to when it can't be used to perform basic computing operations i.e reading its data, copying from or to the hard drive. If these simple operation can't be performed on the hard drive it is termed ‘crashed hard drive’ or ‘failed hard drive’ If you can imagine a record player spinning, the fastest it can spin would be no more than 78 rotations per minute, whereas a standard rotational drive would be spinning around 5,400 or 7,200 times a minute.

While the discs within the drive move at this very fast rate, the read/write heads of the drive are operating within nanometers of the platters that read or write your data. To put this into perspective, the read/write heads are hovering less than a hair's width away from the data platter. You may wonder when your hard drive will fail, but it’s impossible to tell. We get brand new drives that have failed, and we see 7 year old drives that still run well without any issues.

The hard drive is the weakest but most valuable point in your computer’s system, since this is where it stores all of your data. Unlike other components that operate in the computer, standard disc drives have moving parts which can eventually fail. The motor used to put the hard drive in motion can fail. The read/write heads attached to the head assembly can also fail (this is the part that actually reads and writes the data on the disk). They can become askew which would cause data loss by scraping the platter that stores all the data. The platters or disks themselves can also become warped or not spin correctly resulting in failure and potential data loss.

4 Typical Signs Of Failing Hard Drives

Unfortunately, you’ll never know when a hard drive will go bad. Sometimes it will crash right out of the box. Other times you may be able to use your hard drive for years before it starts to fail. If you have not backed up any data then you will probably need to seek a physical hard drive recovery service to recover the data from the drive.

These are very unspecific signs that can be caused by a million different things on your computer. However, regardless of what the issue behind these symptoms is, it is recommended that you immediately make a backup whenever you notice these signs listed below.

1. Strange Sounds From The Hard Drive

Hard drive sounds This symptom is listed first because it's plain sign of a failing hard drive. When you hear strange noises coming from your hard drive, it may be too late already. A repetitive sound also known as the click of death is caused by the head as it is trying to write data and recovers from errors in doing so. Grinding or screeching noises indicate that parts of the hardware, for example the bearings or spindle motor, are failing.

2. Sluggish Computer/Constant Freezes

Slow computer I know this could be very annoying, but if all of a sudden your computer start to respond sluggishly or constantly freezing up there's a big chance your hard drive is failing and such an instance would be the right time to take action on your hard drive.

3. Corrupting Data

Data corruption If you’re beginning to find files that fail to open and are corrupted even though they saved without errors or if files suddenly disappear, you should get worried. Though, this could be due to a multitude of issues, it is also a typical sign for a gradual hard drive failure.

4. Accumulation Of Bad Sectors

Bad sectors are areas of the hard drive that do not maintain data integrity. They are automatically masked by the operating system and thus hard to identify, especially if large amounts of the disk are currently in use. If you actually run into bad sectors, however, that certainly is a bad sign.

You can run a manual disk check to identify errors that Windows has not spotted, yet. In Windows 7, go to > Start > Computer and right-click on the disk or partition you wish to check. Select > Properties, in the window that opens switch to the > Tools tab and click > Check now… In the Checking Disk window place a checkmark next to > Automatically fix file system errors and > Scan for an attempt recovery of bad sectors.

My Hard Drive Is Failing, What Should I Do?

Confused on hard drive computer Well, believe it or not when when your hard drive starts to fail there's nothing you can do to repair or take it back to it normal state, however, backing up your data would be the best and only escape plan, otherwise it's just a matter of time before it fails totally.

In addition to preventive measures to be taken, modern hard drive come with a built-in feature called S.M.A.R.T (Self Monitoring Analysis & Reporting Technology). This feature helps various tools to predict hard drive failures and report them directly to you. But unfortunately like most other methods listed above, S.M.A.R.T. is notoriously unreliable in predicting hard drive failure and the catastrophe will often happen before the warning of S.M.A.R.T. kicks in.

Conclusion

Do not rely on signs or software to tell you whether you have a failing hard drive. It is more likely than not that it will fail unexpectedly and without any warning signs whatsoever. Rather than trying to forecast something that is even less predictable than the weather, you should rely on backups.

What is your worst computer hardware failure you have experienced?

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http://www.ivevex.com/failing-hard-drives-signs-you-must-know/

Lalasticlala
Seun
Semid4lyfe
Ishilove
Mynd44

Very enlightening.

Nice article! But I don't agree on this point "Do not rely on signs or software to tell you whether you have a failing hard drive. It is more likely than not that it will fail unexpectedly and without any warning signs whatsoever." Actually there are many hard drive repair software that can alert you to hard drive issues before they become major problems.

Nice.
I recently checked the health of my HDD and mehn as at yesterday it was 5% healthy. I'll change it next month when I have the money. I've backed up all my stuffs so I have rest of mind.

Thanks for the useful post!
Anyway, I think it's better to be safe and have some data recovery software
Btw, I also want to share an article about how to recovery and protection your HDD https://www.cleverfiles.com/howto/hdd-data-recovery.html