Protect your Hard Drive
Every storage drive dies eventually, and when it's near death, you'll see the signs. Strange noises, corrupted files, crashing during boot, and glacial transfer speeds all point to the inevitable end. This is normal, especially if your drive is more than a few years old.
Older spinning hard drives have moving parts that can degrade over time, or the drives' magnetic sectors can go bad. Newer solid-state drives (SSDs) don't have moving parts, but their storage cells degrade a little bit every time you write to them, meaning they too will eventually fail (though SSD reliability is much better than it used to be).
Unless your drive experiences excessive heat or physical trauma, it'll probably fail gradually. That means, even if your drive isn't making strange noises, you should keep an eye on its health once in a while, so you can prepare for death before it happens. Here's how to do that.
Most modern drives have a feature called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology), which monitors different drive attributes in an attempt to detect a failing disk. That way, your computer will automatically notify you before data loss occurs and the drive can be replaced while it still remains functional.
In Windows, you can manually check the S.M.A.R.T. status of your drives from the Command Prompt. Just type "cmd" into the search bar on the taskbar and open the application. In the pop-up box, run the following:
wmic diskdrive get model,status
It will return Pred Fail if your drive's death is imminent or OK if it thinks the drive is doing fine.
On a Mac, click the Apple icon at the top of the screen and choose About This Mac. Click System Report and select Storage from the list. Make sure the correct drive is selected (it's called Macintosh HD by default) and look for S.M.A.R.T. Status in the window. The status should read Verified, if the drive healthy, or Failing, if there's a problem with the drive.
Install Utility Programs for More Data
The basic S.M.A.R.T. information can be misleading, since it only tells you if your drive is near death. However, you can start to experience problems even if the basic S.M.A.R.T. status is okay. For a closer look, I recommend downloading CrystalDiskInfo for Windows (free) or DriveDx for macOS ($20 with a free trial), both of which will offer up more detailed S.M.A.R.T. information than your computer provides on its own.
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