Should I worry about HDD failiure?

D

Dimitri

Member
This is something I've never really thought about, but lately I've been reading about how HDDs are very unreliable and they can fail at any moment.

I seem to remember reading how the failiure of a HDD is preceded by a sudden appearance of bad sectors - is this a reliable warning, or can they fail without any warning?

How would I know that there are any bad sectors - would I only know if I ran some diagnostics?

Are there cheap HDDs available on the market for backups? Meaning something with poor performances that is designed to serve just for storing backups?
 
Normally if you notice sluggish performance, bluescreens, or failures to load windows then your hard drive could be failing. And yes, you only detect the bad sectors in the manufacturer diagnostic utility.

There are plenty of ways to do backups. I don't have time to explain them all, but other members should be able to help you with that.
 
voyagerfan99 said:
Normally if you notice sluggish performance, bluescreens, or failures to load windows then your hard drive could be failing. And yes, you only detect the bad sectors in the manufacturer diagnostic utility.
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Is this something that I could rely on - meaning unless I'm noticing symptoms I can be sure my HDD isn't going to just fail all of a sudden, that way I'd have time to buy a new HDD and transfer the data without having to buy a backup HDD right now.

There are plenty of ways to do backups. I don't have time to explain them all, but other members should be able to help you with that.
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Oh I can figure out how to do it, I'm just curious as to the cost of the HDDs. Whether there are any specialized cheaper, slower HDDs out there beside the usual offerings that are being sold for this purpose.
 
No specifically for the purpose.

For the record, I've never had a hard drive fail on me. Though I have customers that regularly have bad hard drives. But when you look at their machines, they're loaded down with garbage and the hard drive is constantly clicking away that it just wears down.
 
Hard drives tend to last years before they fail, unless you damage them. They don't tend to just "die", they tend to give signs of death before they die, such as clicking sounds, freezes, blue screens etc. The "click of the death" is probably one of the most obvious signs that a HDD is on the way out.

Check through the Event Viewer in Windows too, that can tell you if you have a bad HDD. If you find a bunch of Disk errors in there, there you go.
 
spirit said:
Hard drives tend to last years before they fail, unless you damage them. They don't tend to just "die", they tend to give signs of death before they die, such as clicking sounds, freezes, blue screens etc. The "click of the death" is probably one of the most obvious signs that a HDD is on the way out.

Check through the Event Viewer in Windows too, that can tell you if you have a bad HDD. If you find a bunch of Disk errors in there, there you go.
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Once these symptoms begin happening would I still have time to create an image of my HDD?
 
Normally you won't have much luck cloning or making an image of the drive. You can try but you might encounter errors while doing so.
 
Dimitri said:
Once these symptoms begin happening would I still have time to create an image of my HDD?
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NO! Don't wait for any indications of failure. Backup now!!! You should do a periodic image backup of your boot drive and more frequent file-by-file backups on your data files. How often you backup your data files depends on how much you value the data and how often it changes.

If you wait for an indication of impending failure, you may have already lost some critical data.

I worked in IBM's disk drive business for 20 years (in case anyone reading this isn't aware, IBM invented the hard drive in 1956). The thing about hard drives is that they are mechanical with moving parts that are susceptible to wear and tear. It's not a matter of IF a hard drive will fail but WHEN.

Hard drives can, and often do, fail abruptly with absolutely no prior indication of a problem.
 
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