!8: Prices Brother Multifunction Center: December 2011

!±8± Your Hard Drive Is Dying, Here Are Several Reasons Why!

How depressed do you think you would be if all of your pictures, music, movies, documents and more just disappeared into thin-air one day, NEVER to be recovered?

If you've never asked yourself what you would do in such a scenario, chances are you are unprepared to experience your hard drive dying! The first thing you should know if you don't already, is exactly what a hard drive is. It's a hardware unit that is built with disks called "platters."

Platters are stacked on top of each other, and have heads that are below and above each hard drive platter. When these platters spin, the heads of the drive move "in and out", toward the center of the platter, then towards the edge; in order to access the actual surface of each platter. To summarize, a hard drive is made of moving parts that contain electromagnetic energy and circuitry.

In other words, a hard drive is constantly creating friction that will eventually destroy it. Yes, EVERY hard disk will fail at some point, the main concern is WHEN?

Here Are The Top 5 Warning Signs Of Your Hard Drive Dying:

Grinding noises, rubbing sound, scrubbing and clicking sounds

A good way to tell if your hard drive is dying, is noises coming from the computer that resemble rubbing (check to ensure the rubbing isn't a computer fan or ROM drive). Noise is a symptom of a mechanical issue in a drive which will eventually lead to data loss. Clicking sounds are warnings of a mechanical issue with a drive, and may

drives fail prior to the clicking sounds beginning, or simultaneously.

Another indication of a hard drive dying is grinding, since the arm containing the head of the drive, literally touches the platter at that point. This creates extra Friction and substantially harms the "read" surface of the drive containing the data.

Please don't forget that hard drives can create sounds that one may mistake for grinding, but normal hard drive operation does not make a grinding, or scrubbing or clicking sound. I highly recommend that you learn how your "healthy" hard drive sounds, so you can recognize any strange sounds and get help immediately!

Your files vanish "into thin air" for no reason

Another big sign of your hard drive dying, is your files disappear without you deleted them! A failing hard disk usually will have "read and write" errors, which are definite causes of data that disappears or becomes corrupted.

It is important to remember that malware (Trojans, viruses etc) can cause corrupt or deleted files, BUT you should always check for virus infections (when data is deleted), with good software BEFORE you begin to suspect your hard drive dying.

Your hard drive is not being detected by your PC

Here is another sign of your hard drive dying; when your computer can't detect your drive at all. Let's imagine to power on your PC, then the logo screen (POST) appears immediately after turning on the computer and reads "Hard Disk Failure", or a related error.

In that situation, your hard drive could have loosened or isn't fully connected, or it could have the wrong "jumper" setting or configuration settings (in BIOS), OR the drive could have totally died and is no longer being detected for that reason.

Here's another scenario; your PC powers on and loads perfectly well. All of a sudden, you see a black screen that has a blinking cursor. You try everything that you know, to get your computer to boot. You try to do a "system recovery" to restore your PC back to the factory defaults but the computer won't start the process.

In this case, your hard drive may have physically failed, or it needs a reformat to restore damaged partition tables, or deleted partitions, or even a damaged Master Boot Record, among other possibilities.

Your computer randomly shuts down or "blue screens", quite often

If you have a computer that is crashing often that isn't overheating, isn't infected with viruses, has no software compatibility issues, has a good power supply and motherboard; may have a dying hard drive.

Data flow interruptions (I/O) can result in a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death), a shutdown of the computer, random restarts and more. If your computer suddenly powers off without warning, after an event such as a lightning strike or power surge (to name two), your drive just might be dying.

Hard drives are programmed internally, to shut a computer down instantly in the event of an event that caused damage to the drive. Many hard disks die soon after the "instant shut down" so if that occurred with YOUR computer, have your drive checked asap, to ensure all is okay.

Let's say you have a healthy hard drive that works perfectly, but something else is causing your PC to start rebooting at random, and shutting down instantly. Did you know that improper shutdown and rebooting can actually cause your drive to become corrupted or to contribute to its premature failure?!

In the event that your computer experiences those problems, always have a professional tech or consultant diagnose your computer BEFORE you suffer data loss or file corruption. You can NEVER put a price on the value of your precious data!

Your drive's access time becomes super slow (read/write time)

When a drive is taking long periods of time to access data, save data etc, it most definitely could be on its way out (or the "mode" it is running in is incorrect). Drives are measure for their speed, in RPMs otherwise known as "Rotations Per Minute." Older drives (and may laptop drives) boast a speed of just 5,400 RPM while newer units run at 7,200 RPM and up to 10,000+ RPM for "high performance" drives.

Seek and access time is another measurement of a drive's speed, which is measured in "nanoseconds". One thing to remember is ALL drives have certain access times and this is the time that you need to "wait" while the drive is retrieving or storing data. As you save more data (or fragment more data) on your drive, access times will increase.

But wait....

A PC that takes a long time loading files such as documents, pictures, spreadsheets etc, could have issues and should be checked for proper operation. If your PC is super duper slow and clicking on icons etc takes literally minutes to load, suspect your hard drive as the culprit AFTER you have weighed out malware infection.

Stay tuned for the next article in this series, which will show you how to test your hard drive using FREE software, and how to fix problems that may arise.