How to know when our hard drives are about to die and one or two options we can take in order to give them a few more weeks of life until we can upgrade them.
If they ask us what’s the most important feature of a PC? We simply answer: all of its components. Therefore, while everyone has its purpose in a computer, a few can make a big difference. Having little or very slow RAM memory will make the user experience very bad, but having a damaged hard drive will have the same effect, regardless of whether you have an eighth-generation i7 and R TX 2080 or an old processor and graphics.
Our hard drives will keep us from noticing damage if they go bad. Regardless of the reason, I think it is quite normal that a hard drive starts to fail. An HDD may suffer from malware, age-related issues, or even an incomplete Windows update that created orders and took over its performance.
In the lines to come, we’ll explain how we know if we need to replace the hard drive and what we can do to protect our data if it’s about to die or needs a tune-up. The answers of our question we can get through finding the best data recovery near me.
Eye! First, we clarify that, although we usually refer, in colloquial language, to “hard disk” as any element that allows us to store data, in this text we focus on the “real” hard disk, the HDD, or hard drive disk, the mechanic. With that said, let’s go with the signs that your hard drive is about to die and how to avoid it.
Sign that the hard drive is bad
There are several signs that our hard drive is going bad. As we said, the hard disk is a fundamental part of our PC, and there are different signs that indicate that it does not work as it should. If we detect any of these symptoms, we must start taking action:
- The computer freezes on a regular basis.
- It turns off much slower than normal.
- The blue screen of death appears with the code that indicates that the problem is with the hard disk.
- If when we try to access certain data a kind of ” click ” sounds, something is happening (and not good).
There are errors, like the first three, that can be repaired by isolating bad sectors, performing an operating system reinstall, or fragmenting the HDD. The ” click ” of the HDD is something more serious, and we will have to make a backup as soon as possible and start looking for a new one.
Go to the Windows’ administrator
If we detect that the computer is slow, we do not download data from the Internet well, we cannot navigate the browser correctly, it is very slow in any action … we must go to the Windows’ administrator to see if something happens with the hard drive.
With the classic combination “control + alt + delete” we access the system administrator in Windows that allows us to know the workload of the processor, the GPU, the memory and … the hard disk. If all goes well, we will see that the hard drive is working and has a significant percentage in use, but never 100%.
If we see that our hard drive is 100% without us doing anything, something is wrong. Go to the process that is consuming the most and close it, we will see how another Windows process is the one that takes its place as the one that uses the most bandwidth on the HDD. It does not matter how many times we do this, since another process will always take its place.
The best we can do in these cases is to shut down, reboot, and diagnose the HDD. Because yes, something is wrong.
Hard drive diagnostics
There are different tools to perform a hard drive diagnosis. One is native to Windows, and it is the one that indicates disk errors. All we have to do is go to the hard drive that we want to analyze right-click and hit “properties”. Once we have done this, a window with the properties of the selected unit appears. We must go to the ” tools ” tab and select ” error checking ”.
If Windows sees an error, it will examine it, and if not, it will tell us that it is not necessary (although we can still examine it for peace of mind). If there are any errors, yes, it will be examined without forcing it.
In addition, we have other tools, such as HD Tune, HD Scan. This third tool will only tell us if the state is good or bad. If it’s bad, listen to it. HD Scan, however, does give us some more data. It is a program that performs different diagnoses of the HDD and tells us both what is right and what is wrong, and why it is wrong. HD Tune marks us the speed and other series of parameters of our HDD.
It is the most reliable way, one of them, to analyze our hard drive to know what is failing.
Bad sectors of the hard disk
This is a section of the hard drive that has become inaccessible. The system constantly makes requests to the hard disk, reading and writing data on it. If you cannot access a sector, either because a program has corrupted it or because a physical component on the disk is defective.
The system will keep trying to write data to that bad sector, and you should know that no, you cannot fix a bad sector on a hard drive. However, what you can do is tell the system not to use that sector. Thus, the system will no longer try to store or read data from that sector when it is crossed out as ” faulty ”.
If you want to know how to repair (or isolate, rather) the bad sectors of the hard disk, we leave you a complete tutorial in which we show you several ways to carry out this process.
What to do if the hard drive is going to die and how to ” put a Band-Aid ”
” Reviving ” a hard drive is not magic. We cannot change the thermal paste, as in the GPU or the processor, to give it a second youth, and of course we cannot, nor is it worth it, to get into an operation to change the magnetic disk or the arms. A hard drive is currently very cheap and it is best to start looking at Amazon for new HDDS.
The best thing we can do if our hard drive is going to die is to clone it. The most advisable thing is to have backup copies made periodically to prevent the death of the hard disk and that its malfunction prevents us from making the backup itself.
How to clone a hard drive!
If we do not have the best thing is to clone the disk (as we leave you in this tutorial) and buy a new one. If it is an SS D, better than better, since, although they have other problems, they will make us gain speed and stability, especially if it is a laptop.
That is, if our hard drive is about to die, we can fragment it, we can isolate the bad sectors, and we can reinstall Windows, but if it is not a system problem, but the HDD, there is not much we can do to extend life and delay the purchase of a new disc.