there are no excuses for this the dog ate my homework wasn't good enough 20
years ago and my hard drive died isn't good enough now how does it make any
sense that we still trust spinning metal discs to hold our vacation photos and
videos our homework and our precious game saves this stuff's important and
hard drives they die all the time can you even tell how close your hard drive
is to kicking the can well what if i told you that there were several ways to
know ahead of time i'll tell you where to look and how to interpret it right
after i tell you about our sponsor war thunder war thunder is an online
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below it's an unfortunate inevitability that once a hard drive comes off the
assembly line it'll never be as good again before you even open up the box it
came in and regardless of how much you baby your system once it's installed
your shiny new hard drive has already started down the path to failure
especially if it showed off loosely packed or without any kind of padding
and when they do eventually fail the sting is just a little bit sharper than
any other component by far the easiest and cheapest way most of us can use to
gauge the health of a hard drive is sound so let's start there it helps to
have fans or any other source of noise unplugged but you can even do this
without an operating system in fact it's easiest to do this in the BIOS where
nothing is being used hit that power button mash the BIOS key and it's time
to play doctor no stethoscope required
you're listening for anything out of the ordinary after hitting the power button
you'll hear the motor spin up and the drive perform a short self-test in the
BIOS a gentle hum is typical but there's
a range of acceptable noises you can expect if a drive has been sitting
inactive as a cold spear for example being in close enough proximity to a
source of vibration over a long period of time will alter the way it sounds
when spinning anything a little higher pitched or whiny though and especially
any clicking or grinding noise when the drive is sitting there doing nothing
that is cause for concern the only acceptable time for a hard drive to make
noise like that is if you are intentionally making them do it if you
do hear something concerning and want to investigate further good news audio cues
aren't the only free sign you might be dealing with a failing hard drive they
can tell you themselves but only if you know how to ask smart is a feature
that's been included in virtually every hard drive since the introduction of the
ata 3 standard it longs a whole host of facts about the drive most crucially a
simple good or no good status and the number of power on ours the one thing
smart can't tell you is where to get the ShortCircuit hoodie only i can do that
ltdstore.com there are a number of different ways you can check in on your
smart data if you're in a situation where you don't have a connection to the
internet the power of the command prompt has you covered you won't get the same
level of detail as a dedicated program but this command will now put a simple
one-word answer that you can use in a pinch to determine if you want to
continue using that drive the other tool that you have access to within Windows
and entirely offline is the event viewer as the drive ages read and write errors
become more commonplace and Windows will keep along of each occurrence one or two
of these warnings on their own is a fairly benign thing the big red flag
that you really don't want to see in the event viewer will be reallocated sectors
if you see any of these you might want to investigate further or monitor more
frequently because if the count is increasing with any regularity that's a
sign the drive is failing if you're looking for a little more detail about
your drive you're going to need some software crystal disk info generally
gets the spotlight for being free and user friendly but you can also consider
victoria hard disk sentinel or hd tune most of these can run the integrated
smart self tests but those last two also have a paid pro version that give access
to benchmarking and detailed error scanning should you want to take a more
in-depth look at the health of the drive speaking of in-depth looks if you want
to take a peek behind the scenes at the LMG offices we've got an exclusive up on
Floatplane right now these programs will show you the full depth of smart
parameters and helpfully turn the one-word answer we saw on the command
prompt into a percentage figure which you can sort of think of as a percentage
of drive life remaining relevant stuff like power on count and hours are listed
and so are the read and seek error rates and the reallocated sectors count we saw
in the event viewers here too you could also generally use these tools on an SSD
but the indicators of a failing SSD are very different to those of a failing
hard drive so your mileage may vary there this is for hard drives today
let's say you have a bit of a fascination with the more macabre side of life want to watch
your hard drive dial a little bit inside in real time
you can do that with hd tune the benchmark included in the free version
is only for read bandwidth but it can still tell you a fair bit once the
benchmark is underway any source of vibration on the drive under load will
result in increased latency during read operations loud music a high RPM fan or
even other nearby drives are all enough to cause read times to increase this is
why dedicated nas drives exist the last programs i'll mention here are specific
to each hard drive manufacturer unless you want to update the firmware though
don't feel pressured to use only the program made by your drive manufacturer
any of them will be capable of performing the basic maintenance tasks
there is one thing that all the tools you have at your disposal for monitoring
drive health have in common though you need to be paying attention just like
how expecting a person to remember to perform backups manually is an
unreliable solution at best so too is not checking in on your drives
occasionally so configure those backups to run automatically and keep your
monitoring program of choice installed maybe set a reminder to let you know
that it's time to check in now that you've got a toolbox that you can use to check on the health of your hard drives
let's talk about used drives like this
20 terabyte exos enterprise x20 from seagate which you may have seen take a
tumble recently we'll have a link to it and other similar drives down below new
ones though never dropped unless people want that would people want that
you've probably read the advice online recommending you to stay far away from
used drives but in reality it's a much more gray area
than you might think and there are plenty of reasons why you might want to
consider picking one up sometimes you just need something anything it just
works regardless of speed or capacity in that case where the heck are you gonna
find a drive for five dollars or if you're just starting your voyage down
the rabbit hole of data hoarding how about paying half the price per Gigabyte
compared to new it's a pretty compelling offer as with any purchase of used
products though you do owe it to yourself to insist on
seeing it in action before handing over any cash in this case first check to see
that the disk is detected in the BIOS and the operating system and then run
your choice of software to check in on that smart data the comfort level for
something like the reallocated sector count will vary from person to person
and drive to drive for some even one is too much while others are happy with
anything under 30. every hard drive comes from the factory with reserved
blocks to handle reallocated sectors so it's a
smart idea to check how many are remaining before proceeding if the
seller is patient there's no harm in going as far as politely asking them to
run an error scan too try to ask ahead of time so that the test is complete by
the time you arrive though instead of you know awkwardly standing around in a
stranger's home waiting for it to hit 100 lastly i keep referring to this because
it is the right way to do things but frankly i would trust three used hard
drives following a three two one backup plan much more than i would trust a
single brand new hard drive you should have three copies of your data on two
different media types and one of those should be off-site to be truly safe so
let's say it's too late and the worst case scenario has already occurred
complete drive failure press f
to pay respects even with careful monitoring
some drives will not at all say anything until they are
moments from death thankfully recovery from an event like this has been made
much simpler than it used to be until recently your only option would have
been to take the drive to a data recovery specialist or if you were lucky
and had a fridge nearby you might be able to do it yourself with
a half working drive but now if your data is in the cloud then good news it
hasn't gone anywhere once you log in again you'll find your cloud compatible
game saves and all your settings will be untouched and any bookmarks you had will
still be there too as long as you didn't have all your passwords saved on that
same hard drive if you've gone through it once
you probably know that you never want to do it again so keep your ears open and
an eye on the drive monitoring software of your choice and you should be able to
avoid that situation from repeating itself trust me guys
hard drive failure sucks unlike our sponsor
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you're looking for something else to watch our tour of a professional data
recovery center was really fascinating that was a lot of fun