I thought i would write this article as we have had a lot of new hard drive replacements recently nearly 2 a day, It’s not a matter of IF your hard
drive will fail, it’s a matter of WHEN it will fail. We always warn about this
because we’ve seen people lose everything–pictures, movies, tax documents–when
their hard drives have failed and they had no reliable backups of their data.
Fortunately for us, our hard drives are equipped with technology to give us
some warning if it begins to gradually fail. This technology is
Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T). It provides a
snap-shop of your hard drive’s state and can help you determine if your drive is
experiencing issues.
There are several ways to get to the
S.M.A.R.T information. One way is to use a third-part utility such as
CrystalDiskInfo. Download and install the tool from here.
The setup is pretty straightforward.
Once you download it, click Next to install.
If you see a screen for a Hotspot
Shield, you can select “I do not accept” to skip installation of that without
it affecting the hard drive software.
As soon as the utility loads you will
see the status of your hard drive. Important things to look at is the overall
health, which in the above example is Good, as well as the temperature of the
drive. Some of the attributes you want to keep an eye on are the following:
Seek Time Performance: If this number begins to rise, it means there is
some type of mechanical problem with the drive and it is becoming harder for it
to access data.
Seek Error Rate: If you are experiencing problems with the
magnetic head of the drive, this number will rise.
Reallocated Sectors Count: This number shows the amount of bad sectors that
have been found and remapped. If this number begins to increase, if could mean
impending doom for the drive.
My Hard Drive Is Failing, Now What?
If you see signs that your hard drive
is heading toward disaster, your best bet will be to immediately copy your data
off to an external hard drive, such as an External USB 1TB Hard Drive we can supply you with one if needed or do the backup for you before we install a new drive for you witha fresh copy of windows and all your data transfer to the new install.
If you want to grab all of the data
from multiple users at once do the following:
In Windows XP, open My Computer, open
the C drive and then right-click and copy the Documents and Settings folder.
In Windows 7, open Computer, open the
C drive and then right-click and copy the Users folder.
Paste this information onto the backup
hard drive. If you do not want to grab everything, you can open the Documents
and Setting folder in XP (or the Users folder in Windows 7) and select only the
folder of the user you want to copy. Inside of each username folder you will
find folders like My Documents, Desktop and Favorites–the three most important
folders for user data.
My Hard Drive’s Health Is Good!
S.M.A.R.T technology should be used
to predict and monitor a hard drive’s health. It does not predict spontaneous
mechanical failures that happen all of the time without any warning at all.
It’s always prudent to keep a backup of your data so you’re ready for these
spontaneous failures. You can use an external hard drive or use cloud services
like Dropbox, Google Drive and my personal favorite Skydrive to
backup your data.
So if you’re having hard drive
problems, such as slow load times, crashes, or if you notice that the size of
your hard drive has reduced, use a utility like this to check the S.M.A.R.T
data for the drive and see if your suspicions of hard drive failure are true. If you need help then don't hesitate to contact us and we can get you up and running in no time.
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