Signs Your Drive Is About to Fail
Drives rarely die without warning. The warnings are easy to miss, and acting on them costs far less than data recovery.
Warning signs
- Clicking, grinding or a drive that sounds busy when nothing is running
- Files that take a long time to open or come up corrupted
- Freezes, especially when opening or saving
- Disk errors or repair prompts at startup
- A health warning (S.M.A.R.T.) from the computer or NAS
- A drive that disappears and comes back
What to do
- Copy your most important files somewhere else now, the most important first.
- Do not run disk repair tools on a drive that is making noises.
- If the copy fails or the drive gets worse, stop and switch it off.
- Have the drive replaced before it fails completely.
How monitoring helps
On a managed plan we watch drive health on every computer and server, so a failing drive is replaced during a planned visit and not during a crisis.
If it has already failed
See hard drive recovery or SSD recovery.
Questions
How long do drives last?
It varies widely. Age, heat and knocks all shorten it, which is why monitoring beats guessing.
Do SSDs give warnings too?
Fewer. They often fail suddenly, which makes a backup even more important.
Book a visit or a pickup
Call us or book online and tell us the make, the model and what is going wrong. For IT support a technician comes to your home or office. For a repair we pick the computer up from your door, fix it at our own workshop in Burbank and bring it back. We have no storefront, so there is nowhere to drop a machine off. Outside our area, you can mail it to us.