When Good Drives Go Bad

 

Hard drives are a crucial part of a computer. If a hard drive goes down it can spell temporary doom for a system. Luckily, short of a major electrical malfunction (which are extremely rare), drive failure will only temporarily bring a system down instead of breaking the entire machine. That said, having a drive fail can be extremely inconvenient if data cannot be recovered.

The first way that a drive can fail is data corruption. This can happen if the drive starts writing data to corrupted areas on the disk. Spinning platter drives (as pictured above) have sectors that can go bad when data is being written to them. Data can be lost if it is written to these sectors. A way to prevent this is to run disk checking utilities. These utilities will go through and "clean" the drive to make sure that bad sectors cannot be written to.

The second way that a drive can fail is physically. Most users don't realize that hard drives have a lifespan. Whether you are using a solid state drive or a hard disk drive, there is only so long that the drive is going to stay alive. Estimates put SSDs living between 3 and 10 years depending on usage. For HDDs, 3 to 5 years is expected. HDD failure is more common because there is a physical disk that is spinning and a small magnetic head that moves back and forth to read and write data. Due to the number of parts, it is hard to list all the ways that an HDD can fail, but the most common symptom of a failing drive is to hear a clicking sound. If you hear a clicking sound, call a repair service or begin moving files off of your system immediately before the drive completely crashes.

The last way is for the motherboard to stop recognizing your drive. While this technically doesn't constitute drive failure, it is equally as distressing as you cannot access any information on the drive until you diagnose why the motherboard isn't reading the drive. A symptom of this is the computer booting to a screen that says something along the lines of "no bootable media found." If this is the case, you will need to take your computer to a repair service to be diagnosed.