- There are no excuses for this.
The dog ate my homework, wasn't good enough 20 years ago,
and my hard drive died, isn't good enough now.
How does it make any sense
that we still trust spinning metal discs
to hold our vacation photos and videos, our homework,
and our precious game saves.
This stuff's important.
And hard drives, they die all the time.
Can you even tell how close your hard drive is
to kicking the can?
Well, what if I told you that there were several ways
to know ahead of time.
I'll tell you where to look and how to interpret it
right after I tell you about our sponsor.
- War Thunder.
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at the link below.
- It's an unfortunate inevitability
that once a hard drive comes off the assembly line,
it'll never be as good again.
Before you even open up the box it came in
and regardless of how much you baby your system
once it's installed,
your shiny new hard drive has already started
down the path to failure,
especially if it showed up loosely packed
or without any kind of padding.
And when they do eventually fail,
the sting is just a little bit sharper
than any other component.
By far the easiest and cheapest way most of us can use
to gauge the health of a hard drive is sound.
So let's start there.
It helps to have fans or any other source of noise unplugged
but you can even do this without an operating system.
In fact, it's easiest to do this in the BIOS
where nothing is being used.
Hit that power button, mash the BIOS key,
and it's time to play doctor.
No stethoscope required.
You're listening for anything out of the ordinary.
After hitting the power button,
you'll hear the motor spin up
and the dry performer short self-test.
In the BIOS, a gentle hum is typical,
but there's a range of acceptable noises you can expect.
If a drive's been sitting inactive
as a cold spare, for example,
being in close enough proximity
to a source of vibration over a long period of time
will alter the way it sounds when spinning.
Anything a little higher pitched or whiny though,
and especially any clicking or grinding noise
when the drive is sitting there doing nothing,
that is cause for concern.
The only acceptable time for a hard drive
to make noise like that
is if you are intentionally making them do it.
If you do hear something concerning
and want to investigate further, good news,
audio cues aren't the only free sign
you might be dealing with a failing hard drive.
They can tell you themselves,
but only if you know how to ask.
SMART is a feature that's been included
in virtually every hard drive
since the introduction of the ATA-3 standard.
It longs a whole host of facts about the drive.
Most crucially, a simple, good,
or no good status and the number of power-on hours.
The one thing SMART can't tell you is
where to get the short circuit hoodie.
Only I can do that, lttstore.com.
There are a number of different ways
you can check in on your smart data.
If you're in a situation
where you don't have a connection to the internet,
the power of the command prompt has you covered.
You won't get the same level of detail
as a dedicated program,
but this command will now put a simple one word answer
that you can use in a pinch
to determine if you want to continue using that drive.
The other tool that you have access to within Windows
and entirely offline is the Event Viewer.
As a drive ages, read and write errors
become more commonplace
and Windows will keep along of each occurrence.
One or two of these warnings on their own
is a fairly benign thing.
The big red flag that you really don't want to see
in the Event Viewer will be reallocated sectors.
If you see any of these, you might wanna investigate further
or monitor more frequently
because if the count is increasing with any regularity,
that's a sign the drive is failing.
If you're looking for a little more detail about your drive,
you're going to need some software.
Crystal disk info generally gets the spotlight
for being free and user-friendly,
but you can also consider Victoria,
Hard Disk Sentinel or HD Tune.
Most of these can run the integrated smart self-test,
but those last two also have a paid pro version
that give access to benchmarking
and detailed error scanning
should you want to take a more in depth look
at the health of the drive.
Speaking of in depth looks,
if you wanna take a peak behind the scenes
at the LMG offices,
we've got an exclusive up on Float Plane right now.
These programs will show you the full depth
of smart parameters,
and helpfully turn the one-word answer
we saw on the command prompt into a percentage figure,
which you can sort of think of as a percentage
of drive life remaining.
Relevant stuff like power-on, count, and hours are listed,
and so are the read and seek error rates,
and the reallocated sectors count
we saw on the Event Viewers here too.
You can also generally use these tools on an SSD,
but the indicators of a failing SSD
are very different to those of a failing hard drive.
So your mileage may vary there.
This is for hard drives today.
Let's say you have a bit of a fascination
with the warmer cob side of life.
Wanna watch your hard drive
die a little bit inside in real time?
You can do that with HD Tune.
The benchmark included in the free version
is only for read bandwidth,
but it can still tell you a fair bit.
Once the benchmark is underway,
any source of vibration on the drive under load
will result in increased latency during read operations,
loud music, a high RPM fan,
or even other nearby drives are all enough
to cause read times to increase.
This is why dedicated NAS drives exist.
The last programs I'll mention here
are specific to each hard drive manufacturer.
Unless you want to update the firmware though,
don't feel pressured to use only the program
made by your drive manufacturer.
Any of them will be capable
of performing the basic maintenance tasks.
There is one thing that all of the tools
you have at your disposal for monitoring drive health
have in common though.
You need to paying attention.
Just like how expecting a person to remember
to perform backups manually
is an unreliable solution at best,
so too is not checking in on your drives occasionally.
So configure those backups to run automatically
and keep your monitoring program with choice installed.
You set a reminder to let you know
that it's time to check in.
Now that you've got a toolbox
that you can use to check on the health of your hard drives,
let's talk about used drives,
like this 20 terabyte EXOS Enterprise X20 from Seagate,
which you may have seen take a tumble recently.
We'll have a link to it and other similar drives down below.
New ones though should have never dropped,
unless people want that.
Would people want that?
But you've probably read the advice online
recommending you to stay far away from used drives,
but in reality it's a much more gray area
than you might think.
And there are plenty of reasons why
you might want to consider picking one up.
Sometimes you just need something, anything that just works
regardless of speed or capacity.
In that case, where the heck are you gonna find
a drive for $5?
Or if you're just starting your voyage
down the rabbit hole of data hoarding,
how about paying half the price
per gigabyte compared to new?
It's a pretty compelling offer.
As with any purchase of used products though,
you do owe it to yourself to insist on seeing it in action
before handing over any cash.
In this case, first check to see that the disc is detected
in the BIOS and the operating system
and then run your choice of software
to check in on that smart data.
The comfort level for something
like the reallocated sector count
will vary from person to person and drive to drive.
For some, even one is too much,
while others are happy with anything under 30.
Every hard drive comes from the factory
with reserved blocks to handle reallocate sectors.
So it's a smart idea to check how many are remaining
before proceeding.
If the seller is patient,
there's no harm in going as far as politely asking them
to run an error scan too.
Try to ask ahead of time so that the test is complete
by the time you arrive though,
instead of awkwardly standing around in a stranger's home
waiting for it to hit a hundred percent.
Lastly, I keep referring to this
because it is the right way to do things,
but frankly I would trust three used hard drives
following a 3-2-1 backup plan
much more that I would trust a single brand new hard drive.
You should have three copies of your data
on two different media types,
and one of those should be offsite to be truly safe.
So let's say it's too late
and the worst case scenario has already occurred.
Complete drive failure.
Press F to pay respects.
Even with careful monitoring,
some drives will not at all say anything
until they are moments from death.
Thankfully, recovery from an event like this
has been made much simpler than it used to be.
Until recently, your only option
would've been to take the drive
to a data recovery specialist,
or if you were lucky and had a fridge nearby,
you might be able to do it yourself
with a half-working drive.
But now if your data is in the cloud, then good news.
It hasn't gone anywhere.
Once you log in again,
you'll find your cloud compatible game saves
and all your settings will be untouched.
And any bookmarks you had will still be there too
as long as you didn't have all your passwords
saved on that same hard drive.
If you've gone through it once,
you probably know that you never want to do it again.
So keep your ears open
and an eye on the drive monitoring software of your choice,
and you should be able to avoid that situation
from repeating itself.
Trust me guys, hard drive failure sucks unlike our sponsor.
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- Thanks for watching guys.
If you're looking for something else to watch,
our tour of a professional data recovery center
was really fascinating.
That was a lot of fun.