A hard drive usually does not just fail. It will give you warning signs for weeks before failure, as sounds, slow downs, tiny, unusual things that are easily dismissed. Below is an outline of exactly how a failing drive behaves from the user’s point of view, the behaviour of each of these symptoms within the casing, and one way to respond to all of them.
Each symptom below indicates the same thing: make backup copies of those files that cannot be replaced today while the drive continues to function. The diagnosis can wait, but the files cannot.
1. Clicking or ticking in a rhythm, especially at start up: when read/write heads can’t locate their reference tracks as they sweep back and forth. That’s the classic one. It has a full guide of its own (which will be covered separately); the quick answer for this one is turn off and leave it that way. 2. Grinding, scraping or squealing: Contact between moving pieces that were designed never to make contact. Every revolution causes wear and tear, and this one needs immediate attention. 3. The spin-up sigh: Your drive starts spinning quickly, then goes into a steady downward pitch and stops. Over and over again. In other words, either the motor or heads aren’t able to finish the process of getting ready to work. All three are physical problems, each problem becomes worse with each time you use the computer and there isn’t anything available from any piece of software to fix these.
4. Freezes and hangs on opening specific folders (cursor spinning, hard disk LED solid) with repeated drive retries for many iterations as the system attempts to access a “stuck” sector before either success or failure occurs. A reliable folder stall point maps out where the damage exists. 5. Copies that crawl: File transfers previously taking minutes have stretched into hours, or they will stall at the same percentage level. This is the same retry storm being measured. 6. Files misbehaving: Opening files in corrupt states; photos with grey bars across them; folders appear empty; filenames turn to gibberish. That’s data dying in place and we’ve learned the critical fact about this death is that it happens unevenly. What’s left of the good stuff can be saved from destruction if you begin saving now. 7. The SMART verdict: Read your drive’s “ledger” in under two minutes using a free tool. If your drive’s Reallocated, Pending, Uncorrectable Sector Counts show any number greater than zero, or if these numbers are increasing over time, that indicates the drive itself is keeping track of how it is failing. Our health-check guide takes you through all the numbers.
The order of the steps is the same regardless of how many signs you’re seeing. Copy the irreplaceable first, your most important stuff (photos, documents, etc.), copying each item once into a separate backup source. Start with the most valuable ones. If the drive is struggling, it is pointless to try to create an exact duplicate of the hard drive using cloning software, as this process requires constant reading from the original source, which will eventually cause the drive to fail. Don’t run repair tools yet (CHKDSK, surface scan) until you have safely copied all of the data. These programs place additional load on the failing drive and will often write information back to the failing areas of the drive. If the evacuation itself stumbles (the computer freezes, there are unusual noises, some files cannot be copied), stop immediately. This could be the final warning signal from the drive that it cannot continue to read its own contents. Your option now would be to use specialised imaging hardware designed specifically for extracting data from failing drives. Our free diagnostic will tell you honestly if you are at the copy-it-yourself stage or past it.
A good rule of thumb is to plan for three to five years of normal usage. There will be those who will lose their drives within the first year, and others whose drives will continue to work longer than the lifespan of their computers. The key thing about planning for your storage needs isn’t how long the average drive works, but rather the distribution of drive longevity. After three years, it’s best to assume that all hard drives could fail soon. It would also be wise to maintain your backups at this point in time. If your hard drive is past that age and shows symptoms, treat it as if it has failed and update your backups immediately.
SMART. SMART (Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) provides a way for drives to report errors on themselves. “Working Fine” doesn’t mean much, as this means that a drive was able to successfully complete recent requests. On the other hand, “SMART Warning” indicates that a drive has identified itself as having issues you haven’t met yet. When we refer to a “warning,” we are referring to the fact that a drive has reported that it is going to need to perform additional repairs such as allocating new sectors for data (re-allocating sectors) and pending reads. Data drives fail from the outside edge in. This is why the files that you access and write to regularly are typically not damaged until later. You should copy your irreplaceable data off the failing drive as soon as possible so that when the failure occurs, you still have your data.
A drive can never go back to being a reliable unit of storage once it begins to fail. Any software application that claims to repair a failing drive simply hides the problem areas from the file system and does nothing to stop the physical degradation of the drive from continuing. The term “repairing” a failing drive is just another way of saying recovering data from a failing drive into a working drive and then removing the failing drive from the equation. Hard drives are consumable products. Your data is not.
Free diagnostics within 48 hours. We provide an honest assessment of how badly a drive is failing and provide a written quote of what needs to be done to recover the data before doing anything.