The average failure rate of a new, working hard drive is around 0.85%.
Hard Drives tend to be hardy and reliable components in your machine, but sometimes they can break down or corrupt your data without much notice. You need to be aware of some subtle signs to avoid data loss.
Keep reading to learn how to spot the signs of hard drive failure before you lose your data.
The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)
An infamous sign that something is very wrong with your PC, the Blue Screen of Death is an error screen that shows up when Microsoft Windows encounters a critical error. Its presence could be due to various errors both with software and hardware. But, if you are experiencing it often, it is an early warning sign of a significant problem that could be hard drive failure.
If you experience a BSOD regularly, you need to take your PC in for a check-up with a technician and ask them, ‘is my hard drive failing?’.
Corrupted Files
One of the major signs of hard drive problems is that of repeatedly encountering corrupted files. If your data was on a broken part of the disc or a sector corrupted by malware, it might be unrecoverable. Corrupted files are an early sign that you need to backup your data and replace the hard drive.
Save what you can do a secondary drive and look into replacing the corrupted drive as soon as possible. A service like Life Guard Data Recovery may help you recover any data lost to corruption or malware.
Strange Noises
A good quality hard drive is usually near-silent when it operates. You may hear a few whirrs when it is up to full speed, but you should not hear long and harsh clicking noises. Clicking or disc turning noises suggest that a component within the disc itself has stopped functioning correctly.
At this point, you should be backing up the data as a matter of urgently. If the disc is not already failing to save data correctly, it will start to do so shortly. Don’t waste time and back all your important data as soon as possible.
Device Won’t Boot
If the hard disc is your primary boot disc and contains your installation of Windows, you may find that a hard drive issue causes the disc not to boot at all. This problem may occur intermittently, booting sometimes and not others. If the drive fails to boot, you will likely see a DOS prompt telling you no drive is available.
If the drive stops booting altogether, you may still be able to perform a hard disc data recovery by removing the disc and extracting the data or by booting Windows with an external drive or USB key.
Signs of Hard Drive Failure
If you experience any of these signs of hard drive failure, then it is time to make sure you have a recent backup of all of your data. Regular backups are the best way to avoid significant data loss on your PC. However, if you are too late, it may still be possible to recover lost data with a data recovery service, so don’t lose hope.
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