Know Most Common Early Signs of Hard Drive Failure
Everyone has their own precious files like personal documents, pictures, videos, or audio files, and they usually store them on hard drives. Very few people realize that most electronic devices, including external hard drives, have rather limited lifetimes when compared to earliest ways to store information, like stone, papyrus, paper, or past school records. At certain times, systems get failed and take all crucial documents or files along with them. Indeed, like some other devices, hard drive is one of the integral part of computer system and also has a lifespan, but unfortunately, users would not be able to judge the exact time of failure and when it takes place, it brings the whole system to halt and makes data inaccessible. Thus, it is very essential to perform the data backup to avoid further annoying situations. Therefore, in the upcoming section, we are going to discuss all possible early signs of hard drive failure in a detailed manner.
Probable Reasons Behind Hard Disk Drive Failure
In general, the hard drive will fail at two distinct points. Some of the warning signs of hard drive failure are mentioned below:
- At the very Beginning
The main cause for early signs of failing hard drive is a manufacturing defect. Users can easily experience in a short time period. However, using stringent quality control and testing approaches, it has decreased a lot yet; it could still happen.
- At the Moment It is Moving to End
There is no particular reason for this. Typically, all these kinds of failures occur after 3 to 4 years of usage. Besides, one point is, sure, i.e., it indicates some common signs. These signs are also a clue that the storage device is near to expiry date.
5 Top Most Warning Signs of failing Hard Drive
Go through the following early signs of hard drive failure that are given below:
1. Slowing Down PC & Blue Screen Of Death
These are very unclear warning signs of hard drive failure that may be triggered by different things. Though regardless of what an issue behind these symptoms is, it is advisable that users immediately create a backup copy. If these issues occur after a new installations or in Windows Safe Mode, it is almost certain that it is due to bad sectors on hard drive, and the possibility of hard drive failure.
2. Corrupt or Damaged Data Items
If users start to find each file that fails to open and even corrupted anyhow they saved without any errors or if files suddenly disappeared, you should become worried. While again this can be due to a large number of issues, it is also an ordinary first signs of hard drive failure.
3. Accumulation of Some Bad Sectors
Bad sectors are a region of hard drive that do not maintain the integrity of data. They are automatically covered by an operating system and hence hard to identify, especially if a large amount of disk space is currently in use. If users actually run into a bad sector, however, that surely is the bad sign.
Users can run the manual disk check to identify all errors that Windows has not spotted, further. In Windows 7, click on Start button, go to Computer and right-click on disk or partition users need to check. Choose Properties, in the window that opens switch to Tools tab and click on Check now… Under the Checking Disk window a checkmark next to fix the file system errors automatically and scan to attempt the recovery of bad sectors.
4. Strange Noises From the Drive
When users hear the strange noises that comes from a hard drive, it would be too late already. The repetitive sound also called as click of death is caused by head as it is attempting to write the data and recovers from a mistake in doing so. Grinding or yelling noises indicates that parts of a hardware, for example, the spindle motor or bearings, are failing.
5. SMART Data Errors
There are lots of applications that aim to predict hard disk drive failure by reading SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) data, which is noted by operating system. Unfortunately, like the other methods listed above, SMART is an unreliable in predicting the hard drive failure and catastrophe will occur before the warning of SMART kicks in. The possible cause is logical or physical errors due to which hard drive crash or severe damage.
A Smart Way for Recovering Your Lost Data
If the above-described methods in case of early signs of failing hard drive failed to repair or recover corrupt data from any hard drive. Then, users can opt for a reliable third-party tool i.e., Hard Drive Data Recovery that helps to regain photos, videos, documents and some other multimedia files. It is especially programmed to support formatted and corrupted FAT, ExFat and NTFS file Recovery. It has a user-friendly interface that even a novice user can understand its complete working.
Time to Conclude
A lot of people will face several first signs of hard drive failure like their hard drive is not working or not responding. After considering all these problems, thus we have discussed two major causes of hard disk failure. Furthermore, we have explained five early signs of hard drive failure in an absolute way. Else, users can take help of an automated solution named by SysTools to restore corrupt data from internal or external storage devices without any hassle.