Chicago
Track Your Order
0
Hard Drives: The Ticking Time Bomb Inside Your Computer
While SSDs are the preferred storage medium today, hard drives are far from obsolete. They're still the best way to store data that doesn't benefit from SSD speed, and of course people use them for cold data storage too. Something SSDs aren't suited for.
However, if you have data that only exists on mechanical hard drives with no alternative form of backup, you need to be aware of the countdown to destruction that started as soon as that drive powered on for the first time. A countdown with no definitive number.
Every Mechanical Drive Has an Expiration Date
Everything in the universe has a finite lifespan, so it's nothing special to say that your mechanical hard drives will die eventually. What makes the demise of a mechanical drive notable is how many factors are involved and how unpredictable that failure can be. I've had hard drives that ran every day for ten years straight with no complaints, and I've also had to change 30 hard drives out in a computer center in one day that all failed within three months of purchase.
Inside the drive there are literally so many spinning plates, but also many metaphorical ones. You have a set of platters spinning at thousands of revolutions per minute, while the magnetic heads that read and write data float above those platters on a cushion of air thinner than a human hair.
Honestly, it's a small miracle every hard drive doesn't just explode as soon as you turn it on. Instead, you'll see something called MTBF or Mean Time Before Failure which is exactly what it says on the tin—the average time that model of drive runs before failing. The thing is, that doesn't tell you the distribution of those failures, and of course outliers are a normal part of it. Add to this, these numbers are usually extrapolated from testing under ideal conditions when it comes to heat and humidity.
How to Spot the Early Warning Signs
If you're lucky, your hard drive will actually give you clear warning signs before failing. This can give you a chance to save crucial date, but this isn't guaranteed by any means and you should obviously not rely on this fact.
Still, if your hard drives start making clicking or grinding sounds, that's a sure sign you don't have long. Known as the "click of death", this has been a core diagnostic for impending drive failure for as long as I can remember.
If the drive's performance suddenly takes a sharp dip, or you get a S.M.A.R.T error on startup, it's time to save what you can. Errors when trying to read or write files are another obvious indicator. If you need to restart your computer a few times before a drive is recognized, something is also likely wrong with it.
Test Your Drive Before It’s Too Late
You don't actually have to wait for warning signs to be forewarned of drive failure. The aforementioned SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) lets a hard drive keep diagnostic data about its own operational record. You can use utilities like CrystalDiskInfo to view this data on Windows, DriveDx on macOS, and smartmontools on Linux.
In most cases, there's a simple readout with green, yellow, and red indicators, but you'll want to pay attention to these:
- Reallocated Sector Count: Bad sectors the drive has already marked and replaced.
- Current Pending Sector Count: Potentially bad sectors that haven’t been remapped yet.
- Spin-Up Time: A sudden increase can indicate motor wear.
- Read Error Rate: Frequent errors suggest physical damage to the platters.
If you see yellow or red warning icons—or values that keep creeping upward—it’s time to start planning your data migration. SMART has never been perfect, but it's still the best we have at predicting a failure long before data loss happens.
Back Up Everything—Right Now
No software tool will fix a failing drive, and you should not wait for it to start failing before you make sure your data is safe. The best strategy is to follow the 3-2-1 rule:
- Keep three copies of your data.
- Store them on at least two different types of media.
- Keep one copy off-site or in the cloud.
Modern cloud services make it fairly easy to back up data on a service that follows world-class data protection, and you can also consider using a NAS on your local network with drives in RAID 1 or RAID 5.
The most important factor is to automate your backups, so that you can't forget to back up the latest data or changes.
Plan for Replacement, Not Repair
When a drive starts failing, your only real option is to replace it. Specialists can often repair a failed drive, but this is an expensive option only used when there's irreplacable data on a broken drive. Like your cryptocurrency wallet.
You should also be proactive and treat your drives like consumables. So replace drives with critical data every three to five years, regardless of SMART data or that they're working as intended. You don't have to throw the old drives away. You can make them part of a RAID array, or use them to store non-critical files like media or apps that can always be re-downloaded.
Hard drives aren't going anywhere, so it's best to handle them the right way, or suffer the indignity of losing your data from a completely preventable event.
