In addition to warning you of problems through the sounds it produces, a mechanical drive can also warn you via the data (statistics) it collects. There is no cost involved for this check up and there are 5 minutes of time required; sixty seconds by listening with your ear to what the drive says about itself, followed by a free tool reading its black box recording system. Here are the details on how to do each half as well as some possible responses which will be non-destructive.
If a disk is clicking, scraping or spinning up over and over again before sighing back down, you have lost all hope for your hard drive’s health; no need to run another diagnostic scan... If you run one anyway, the mileage on the failing mechanical parts will be increased.
First, locate a quiet area; then, plug in the machine, and listen for the first minute of operation. It’s during this initial spin-up that a mechanical drive reveals its true nature. A healthy hard disk presents a uniform rise in pitch while spinning up, followed by a very soft and intermittent ticking sound when loading data. Trouble can be quickly identified using an extremely limited number of terms: rhythmic clicking (the heads are attempting to position themselves and are unable to do so); scraping or grinding (there is contact where there shouldn’t be; shut down now). A drive may also produce audible beeping or whining due to a motor which is struggling to spin. Another sign of trouble is if your drive goes through the spin-up-sigh-silence cycle. If you hear any one of the above mentioned signs, it completely nullifies anything a utility program might indicate after running. Your drive has made its declaration, and further running is wear; the only reasonable next step is to take your drive to a clicking-drive bench rather than attempt to recover data yourself.
If your drive is quiet, open up the log for that drive. On a Windows machine, use CrystalDiskInfo. On a Mac, use Disk Utility’s SMART line or smartctl. If it was built by Seagate, use SeaTools. If it was made by Western Digital, use WD’s Dashboard. All of these applications read the self-managed journal entry. Skip right over the headline verdict and go straight to three sector counters: Reallocated Sectors (areas of disk that have been swapped out with spares because they stopped working), Pending Sectors (areas currently unable to read, probably where your files are located), and Uncorrectable Sectors (reads which failed even after every retry). Healthy will show zero in all three fields; a small static number indicates scars; and movement is what matters most here. The more the counter changes between checks, the sooner your drive will be planning its own funeral. Also take a glance at Spin Retry. Any value above zero will mean the motor has had trouble, which is rarer and worse than a bad sector. Age and temperature can be contextual factors but should never be used as conclusionary factors. In addition, note that some USB enclosures block SMART entirely. In this case ‘no data’ through a caddy doesn’t mean healthy; it just means unreadable.
When there is a warning about a problem, your instincts will want to run further diagnostics: complete surface scans, use CHKDSK, or even activate the “fix” utility provided by the manufacturer. Know what they are: extended periods of non-stop reading (in the case of a complete surface scan), and/or writes (for example, with CHKDSK) applied to a device which has recently complained of a problem. CHKDSK is specifically commonly misunderstood as being used for diagnostic purposes only, when in fact CHKDSK is primarily a file-system repair tool. CHKDSK may report success on a dying disk while simply adding to the load that kills the disk. A professional’s approach is the opposite: evacuate first (remove the data at risk) and copy all irreplaceable data, most precious first, into another storage location while the original drive still responds. Then, allow diagnostics to begin once the data is no longer at risk. If removing the data is problematic too (if multiple files are hanging in the process of copying, if the machine freezes during this process, if new sounds develop during this process) then that is likely the final communication from the drive that it cannot recover. That is the time to shut down the machine and send the drive to the hard drive recovery lab where specialised equipment attempts to read failing drives using less stressful methods than any OS.
For a drive you rely on, perform this test twice per year. Perform this test immediately after any unexpected event that could have damaged your drive (an accidental drop, a house move, an unexplained freeze, etc.). The test is fast, only taking about two minutes. It should not be a burden. What is a burden is remembering. Schedule the test in conjunction with something else you currently do regularly (such as cleaning your computer). Take a screen shot of the results of the test every time. This allows you to compare results over time and avoid making guesses.
No. Be very cautious of claims made by software products claiming otherwise. Reallocation and damage of sectors are essentially permanent scarring of your disk drive. Software products such as ‘repair’ utilities, only mask bad areas of your disk from the file system. Once a drive begins reallocation it is on a path of no return. Professional recovery and retirement of failed disks involves getting the data off the old disk onto new hardware and allowing the old disk to rest.
No one that is completely truthful will give you an estimate. Some drives continue to be in “caution” mode for several months; others fail after just a weekend, with workload usually being the determining factor (every time a drive is used, it adds one more spin of the wheel). The “practical” interpretation of ‘caution’ is not ‘watch it’, but ‘make copies of all your irreplaceables now, while reading them is still cheap’.
If you want someone’s opinion about the sound of your disk, describe it to us. Or if you want their opinion based solely on a SMART report screenshot, a Bristol-based engineer can also give you an honest assessment. Free 48-hour diagnostic; written quote before any work is done.