Hard drives-simple steps to identify and alleviate disaster

Most of us will deal with a hard drive crash(or 2) at some point in our computer use. This generally involves a lot of downtime and worry about lost files, photos, etc.

A fact: Mechanical failures account for about 60% of all drive failures. While the eventual failure may be catastrophic, most mechanical failures result from gradual wear and there are usually certain indications that failure is imminent. These may include increased heat output, increased noise level, problems with reading and writing of data, an increase in the number of damaged disk sectors(re: bad spots on the drive).


First, lets identify a few telltale signs that you may have a physical drive issue:

1. You try to copy files to or from the drive and it fails.
2. Your computer tries to run chkdsk when you start it up from power off.(tip..let it run)
3. Your computer is running a lot slower than normal
4. Your computer is making ticking noises.

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it covers the common bases.

Lets assume all is running well and you just want something to monitor your system: Acronis Drive Monitor is a great solution. Acronis requires you to register to get it, so I put it here: SOFTWARE    for everyone to download. Just click the link and install. Its a next-next next and finish type install

It leverages SMART technology that is built into nearly every drive made today.

You are interested in the disks portion of the utility. There is a tab that outlines your backup software, and they may try to sell you this. Just ignore it and pay attention to any possible negative information in the disks section.

By the way, don't ignore the warnings. We deal with  a lot of drive failures that could have been a simple copy and replacement, but turn into an expensive recovery job because the warnings were ignored.

How expensive? Our average price is  $120 for a hard drive swap for Windows/MAC. 
This included imaging the old drive and installing the new.

The average cost for just the recovery portion of a failed hard drive is $300. It can scale to $1000+.

Next article will assist with what to do in case of a failure.

Happy Computing

Brett