Telltale Signs Your Harddrive Is Failing
 

What are the signs that your harddrive is about to "take a dirt nap?" Funny noises? System malfunctions? I want to know what to look for? Thanks

My experiences have been a total surprise. I never noticed anything malfuntioning with it, it just died.

There are lots of sings that your hard drive just failed, though I don't know of any that it's about to fail.

What about this: I have two harddrives a 40 and 80. The primary is the 40 and the 80 is where I keep all my music and videos. Could my computer still boot up if my 40 failed and would I still be able to access the 80. Just wondering

If your 40 died, you could put the 80 in another computer and get the files. You would not be able to boot into a system, though (unless you have an OS on the data drive).

My hard drive would do hard stops when reading a lot of data (you'd hear it reading hard.. and then bam.. it'd do a loud click and stop.. then it'd start again). A friend of mine's hard drive would stop.. he'd tap/kick the harddrive/computer.. and it'd start up again.

Interesting info here. Thanks for everone who has and will put input in here as I'm curious myself.

Don't mean to hijack, but I hope MahlerIsGod (great nick by the way! ;)) doesn't mind if I add a supplemental question of "to the best of your knowledge, how long do most hard drives last before they fail?"

I figure a new thread just for that question doesn't make too much sense.

Most of the time the drive will just stop with little or no warning. Occasionally though you will a metalic clunking sound which is a sure sign your drive is on the way out. If you run Linux, check the logs and see if you get any hard drive seek or write errors.

Also a neat tip on recovering data from dead hardrives is to place the hardrive in the freezer for an hour than install back into system.

I've never had a harddrive fail on me... and I still have HDs lying around from the good ol days when 386s were the stuff...

If you harddrive has "S.M.A.R.T" it's supposed to give you warnings on startup or during use if the harddrive "thinks" it's going to run into problems. However, even though I have harddrives that support that, I've never seen it in action before a hard drive failed.

Usually it'll come out of the blue, but sometimes is proceeded by WinNT/2000/XP blue-screens, VERY slow disk access and strange noises coming out of the hard drive. If you get CRC errors, you're probably in for much worse.

The "clunking sounds" are a pretty good indication, so if you hear anything weird, back up your most important files ASAP. I've never heard of the freezer harddrive trick, it sounds dangerous, but I'll try it with some of the hard drives from my "junk" pile... :)

yep pretty much every drive that ive had that has failed. made an odd clicking sound before it died.

The freezer trick works quite well, I've sucessfully recovered the data from many drives doing this.

Here's what I do:
Put drive in freezer bag then place drive in freezer for approx 1 hour.
Connect drive to pc that already has OS.
Boot into OS and quickly copy as much data from the drive until it stops responding.
Go to fridge and collect beer, open beer and marvel in your in ingenuity at recovering your valuable data ;-)

That ominous clicking noise is the drive
repeating a "seek to spindle" as the firmware
tries to recover from its inability to locate
a cylinder.

SecretMethod70: the life of most hard drives
(in my experience) is greater than the useful
life of the PC. That is, for practical purposes,
they don't fail.

However, because any of us could be the
unlucky one-in-a-million: Backup, Backup,
Backup. DVD writers are cheap and easy.
Which reminds me I should go scan the
Titty Board now...

mine made a "trrrrrr" noise when it was about to give out and the bios wasnt able to recognize it on some boot's.

Mine makes an arrrgghh OMFG jesus F christ noise just about the time it dies, wait no thats me.

Depends on the failure, sometimes its a click death, sometimes its the retry over and over, and sometimes its ninja stealth death.

Check event logs often in windows XP/2k and run the SMART toolsets from the OEMS once in a while.

I usually work on the expectation that it'll be 12-24 months for a hard drive to fail.

Does this actually work?

The guaranteed life on a hard drive is 3-5 years, anything after that and your playing with fire. It depends on how heavy your use is, and what quality/type of drive.

SCSI server drives don't last very long at all and have "frequent" failures because they are running 24/7 with heavy usage.

I had one over the summer that died on me. There were no problems except a horrible, horrible grinding sound whenever I opened up one particular mailbox in Outlook.
It soon grew to the point where it was making that noise a few times during start up and whenever I clicked on the C: drive in My Computer.

At that point I bought a new drive copied all the necessary shit I wanted to keep on to it and took out the old drive. I continued to use it as my primary in a second computer just to see what would happen. It got to the point where half way though booting into XP it would just grind continuously and not boot completely into windows. I let it sit grinding for 10 minutes and then I figured that it was truly dead.

Backup what you can't afford to lose on a monthy basis! Less than a buck a month to backup to a CDR!!!

Also Replace a HD every 2 3/4 years by RMA'ing it back to the company.

That's crap. SCSI drives will typically last at least 3 years, sometimes 5 or more, easily. Most of my SCSI drives have lasted at least 3 years. In contrast, most of my IDE/ATA drives lasted less than 3 years.

I just had an 80GB IDE drive fail after only about a year. Granted, it was a member of the IBM DeathStar family. Just replaced it with a brand new 160GB WD SE. :)

Oh yeah, and if you're looking at SCSI, I heartily recommend the Maxtor 10K III or IV series. They rule. And you get 5 year warranties, which is nothing to shake a stick at. :)

Well, unless you really gotta have that much space for all your porn or music. :D

'guaranteed' life on a good scsi drive is 3-5 years, on an IDE its typically 1 and they are both limited warranty,

MTBF on a IDE is based on 7-11 hours powered on a day , 132 or so minutes actual accessing,
SCSI 24 hours a day powered up, 432 minutes or so accessing

There are the numbers the manufacturer will tell you
 

And then there are the numbers you will actually see...

Some just go on forever no matter how much use they get.

I've noticed a rhythmic click. Also have experienced the total surprise death, no hint, no warning. You'll also see data loss, write errors, and read errors.

How about me getting extremely frustrated with (yet another) hosed ME system and smacking my laptop with a rolled up newspaper? Stupid I know!

Clicking for some drives/laptop drives especially.
IBM drives dying with the 'pixie dust' used on them usually get really loud and sound very high pitched.
Hmm.. freezer trick? You're really lucky if that worked, probably because the platters get smaller due to the coldness and re-levitates the head (it hovers very closely to the platter) .. Mostly only going to work on a head crash, and the only data your gonna get is where it didn't hammer onto the platter, AND if the head is still alive :)