4 warning signs that your hard drive is dying

In this technology-dependent world, we have our own digital stashes of data—photos, films, TV shows, games, software-- that we want to keep forever. In most of the cases, that data size keeps on getting bigger till the time we run out of hard disk space on our PC and to accommodate that data, we procure external hard disk drives.

Like any electronic device, a hard disk, be it an internal storage or external, comes with a lifespan. Usually the average lifetime of a computer’s internal storage is 5-10 years and of an external one it is around 3 to 5 years, provided they are not exposed to temperature variations, humidity and other external factors.

Since external HDDs have become quite common these days and given the fact that they are highly portable, they may encounter some rough use from time to time, which can decrease their lifespan even more. In this article, we will tell you how to detect if your hard drive is slowly dying and the steps you need to take to save your precious data:

Warning sign 1: One of the many possible symptoms of a failing hard drive is when your computer gets slow or begins to hang frequently or you see the ‘Blue Screen of Death’. These signs do not appear always due to a dying hard drive but if you encounter these problems after new installation or in Windows Safe Mode, it clearly points to a malfunctioning hard drive.

Warning sign 2: Another unspecific but possible reason for hard drive failure is when files don’t open and you find them corrupted even after they got saved without any errors or if they vanish outright.

Warning sign 3: Too many bad sectors indicates poor health of hard drives. Bad sectors are hard drive areas that are automatically masked by the operating system. They are hard to identify, especially in case of large amount of disk being in use.

To check for bad sectors in Windows, go to the drive partition through ‘My PC’, right click on it to go to ‘Properties’, then go to tools and click on ‘Error checking’. For optimisation, click on ‘Optimise and defragment drive’.

Microsoft Windows also checks for bad sectors at the time of a full format or when using chkdsk command.

Warning sign 4: If a peculiar repetitive sound or grinding/screeching sound is coming out of your hard drive, the drive may be quite close to dying. The repetitive sound is called the ‘click of death’ which is produced by the head when attempting to write and recovering from errors in the process. Grinding sounds are the signs of dying hardware parts like the spindle motor, bearings etc.

We cannot always be prepared for something like a hard drive failure. Keeping a backup of your data on another hard drive is a good way to keep it safe as chances of both the drives failing simultaneously are very thin. Else, back it up in cloud services like Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.