Out of all the PC’s parts and components, nothing needs your care and attention more than your hard drive. You have probably heard of horror stories of hard drives failing, or perhaps you have experienced this yourself. No matter what you do, at some point, you may experience defragment drives and malfunctions.
It is quite apparent when your hard drive starts to fail, you will sometimes hear it coming, it could fail in the middle of a project, or one day, it’ll just refuse to boot. And since hard drives are complex and complicated devices, you may need a computer repair service to restore your drive.
Hard drives contain primary components that have magnetic platters. These platters carry your data, and when you accidentally drop your PC, or you suddenly move it without caution, you may damage these platters and your drives may sustain immense damage.
However, you can prevent these mishaps by following some of our tips. In this article, we will share with you our PC guide to help you monitor your hard drive’s health.
Utilise SMART
An effective tool to help you monitor your hard drive’s health is its Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, also known as SMART, feature. This system is built into the hard drive and SSDs, allowing you to receive reports on when your drive’s health, if it is encountering issues, or if it’s failing.
To use this, you need to run Windows command-line utility, Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line or WMIC. This will give you precise health results based on your hard drive’s SMART statistics.
Check CrystalDisk information
If you want a more detailed report, you can use the CrystalDisk info or CDI. CDI is a free desktop program that allows you to check information about your disks in a more detailed way. This is because it displays a status for each drive, following a colour-coding system: blue for good, yellow for caution, red for bad, and grey for unknown issues.
When you run a CDI check on your drive and find colours other than blue, it’s best to seek computer services to help you troubleshoot the issues and recover your files and drive.
Keep an eye on how your drive behaves
Although SMART and CDI systems are beneficial, you must also keep an eye on how your drive behaves and sounds. Once you start hearing a grinding noise from your PC, you are most likely dealing with a hard drive problem and could be an obvious sign that it will begin to malfunction or fail soon.
Besides its sounds, you should also note the frequency of crashes, error messages, and odd file names and folders popping up. When you find some of these issues, you need to run checks and get your hard drive repaired as soon as possible.
Conclusion
The best way to deal with hard drive failures and malfunctions is to prevent them from happening in the first place, and you can do this by monitoring your drive daily and running system checks. Besides that, you might want to start doing regular backups just in case your drive may file one day. Keeping these tips in mind or taking your PC to computer support experts, you will be able to prevent these hard drive issues and deal with them before it is too late.
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