How to Tell if Your Hard Drive is Failing?

Hardware failure can be one of the worst things to happen to an enthusiast, not to mention a professional. Even regular consumers can lose lots of data in the case of a hardware failure. Data is stored on hard drives or more recently, solid-state drives, also known as HDDs and SSDs.

Hard drives are the more common method of storage, particularly if we are talking about storing data, rather than daily use, such as a boot drive or a work drive. Hard drives are still somewhat notorious about their failure rates, particularly since the introduction of SATA and NVMe SSDs which have no moving parts. The best way to save your data is to prevent a complete hard drive failure. Following is a guide on how to tell if your hard drive is failing.

Signs of a Failing Hard Drive

Hard drives have a life expectancy of between three and five years. Most warranties cover up to five years. Even the highest-grade NAS drives have up to five years of limited warranty. Mechanical drives can have hardware failure, as well as software failure, where the hardware part is more complicated and limits the warranty.

Moving parts, particularly when something is that precise and needs to operate for a long time, while preserving your data, is a liability. Following are both the hardware and software failing hard drive symptoms.

How to Check If My Hard Drive is Failing – The Hardware

Hard drives, with moving parts like the spindle and the actuator arm, have a higher probability of failure than solid-state drives. Most of the time, when there is a hardware failure, the motors which drive the moving parts are the culprits, meaning the spindle and the actuator arm motors.

Other hardware failure types are due to mishandling such as dropping the device, whereupon irreversible damage can be caused to the magnetic platter and actuator arm. The electronic circuits may fail, leading to an unusable drive. Finally, the bearings may wear off, which is another mechanical property of the drives.

Look at the following signs your hard drive is failing, from the hardware point of view.

actuator arm crash

An actuator arm crash, a relatively common mechanical failure.

Strange noises such as clicking, beeping and scratching

These types of noises can mean anything from the read/write head trying to read and write data on bad sectors to the motors not working properly. If you hear such noises and your drive is still working, you might want to consider backing up your data, though that should be done prior to any signs of failure.

Overheating

Overheating is a very common sign that points to the moving parts of the hard drive. At that point, it is best not to use the hard drive unless it is to back up or recover the data.

Blue screens or equivalent crashes

The notorious blue screens of death could be a sign that your HDD is failing. Blue screens could point to other things such as a bad SATA controller, or anything that is impeding the communication between the drive and the system.

Failure to boot or be registered by the system

If you have a system installed on a hard drive, and the system fails to boot, or the device fails to be recognized in general, could point to a hardware error. If your device is only intermittently detected, that is a sign of concern to be taken seriously.

read write head up close

A read/write head up close

How to Test if Your Hard Drive is Failing – Logical Errors

Hard drives have a software side to them, or rather, a logical side. The logical side or hard drives refers to the electronics of the hard drive, as well as the status of the sectors. Logical errors may happen due to viruses, or issues on the motherboard side of things.

Look for these signs that your hard drive might be having logical issues.

Missing or corrupted files and folders

If your files start missing all of a sudden, not to mention slow loading times and entire folders disappearing, your hard drive might be having logical issues. Seeking professional help or running S.M.A.R.T. (self-monitoring, analysis and reporting technology) checks are advised. S.M.A.R.T. might not return any errors, but that might be a false result due to a logical error.

Failure to mount a device/device error messages

If your hard drive fails to mount, even though it is apparently working and recognised during the boot sequence, then it is time to run software checks. Error messages of any kind regarding the HDD should be taken seriously, even if they are intermittent.

S.M.A.R.T. reports errors, as well as the system

While missing files are obvious signs of bad logic, if your HDD S.M.A.R.T. system starts sending warning messages, immediate action should be taken. Third-party tools might be helpful, or using the manufacturer’s own HDD monitor software.

failed hard drive

The author’s hard drive which started displaying the usual suspects of failure such as slow read times for folders with little to no data on them, as well as unreadable files.

S.M.A.R.T. also reported multiple errors. The drive was decommissioned as soon as the errors were identified.

What to Do After Recognizing Potential HDD Failure

Realizing that your HDD might be failing should not be a cause for panic. Depending on the errors, contacting a data recovery company is the best cause of action. If you value your data on the drive, or rather, if it has not been backed up, consider getting another hard drive for backup, or even an external enclosure so that you can store the data outside your PC (with regular HDD checkups).

If the drive does not hold any valuable data, then replacing the drive is the best possible action to take. Bad drives can cause system crashes, and they might not be the obvious culprit from the get go.

Conclusion and Summary

Hard drives typically have a lifespan of three to five years. They can have hardware and logical failures. Anything from excess noise from the drive such as scratching or beeping, system crashes, unreadable files, corrupt data or S.M.A.R.T. displaying error messages is a symptom of an HDD failure.

Contact a data recovery service if you have any valuable data on a failing hard drive. The failing hard drive should be replaced. If you only have video games on the drive, then simply buy a better gaming hard drive.

Backup your data, so that in the case of an eventual failure, the bad HDD can be replaced.

About The Author

Milan Zagorac

Milan has always been interested in writing and technology, but managed to pick up a love for music, literature and sports along the way. Essentially a jack of all trades, his interest in all things tech as well as love for the written word, keeps him well occupied.

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