Reason to fear for the health of my harddrive?

[Viking]

My computer is about 2 1/2 years old. I`ve used 78 GB out of 111 GB total capacity.

What is the risk that it may "die" ? Does the risk increase most with age, or with used capacity? Have anyone on this board experienced the death of their harddrive?

Sorry for all the questions..

[doc_bean]

I've had a HD crash after a few months and I've had HDs for years. My current one predates the rest of my system IIRC, so it's probably around 4 years old now. I now people with older HDs too. I'm not sure there is a decent way to determine the risk of HD failure.

I heard defragmenting can cause damage, but I'm not sure if it's true.

[Conqueror]

No matter how new or old your HD is, you should always be prepared for the chance that it might die tomorrow.

[Mikeus Caesar]

They can die at any moment for no reason. They might just completely die instantly, or do what mine did last year, continue being mostly usable for possibly months on end before finally dieing.

But yes, age does play a part. If you're scared of it dieing, just make sure you make backups of everything you want to keep on a memory stick or spare/portable hard-drive.

[Xiahou]

No matter how new or old your HD is, you should always be prepared for the chance that it might die tomorrow.

Yeah, it could really die almost any time- how full it is and, to an only slightly lesser extent, it's age should make no difference.

That's not to say there cant be warning signs though. If it starts making a new kind of noise, for example, you should be a little concerned. Also, if your hardware supports SMART monitoring (most do in my experience), you can find a program to display your HDs SMART info and they often give it a pass/fail grade based on it. Those stats are far from foolproof, but if they start to drop into the "fail" zone you should definitely start looking for a new drive, imo.

My Linux server's HD has been making a faint(sometimes it seems to get louder), high pitched whining noise for months now. I'd been expecting it to fail, but it still passes all SMART testing and has been going like that for about 5 months now. I'm trying to keep up to date on backups though, just in case.

[LeftEyeNine]

Xiahou is right. A S.M.A.R.T. monitoring tool will be useful for you to determine how healthy your HD is. S.M.A.R.T. is enabled from BIOS settings of your system. And here is a freeware program for you to monitor S.M.A.R.T. attributes of your HD after enabling it : HD Tune

[Viking]

Thanks for the input. I think I`ll go and by a bacup HD ASAP after reading this.

I made a quick scan with HD tune, and my HD's health appeared to be ok. I`ll test it more later. Thanks for the program, LEN.

[orangat]

My computer is about 2 1/2 years old. I`ve used 78 GB out of 111 GB total capacity.

What is the risk that it may "die" ? Does the risk increase most with age, or with used capacity? Have anyone on this board experienced the death of their harddrive?
Sorry for all the questions..

If you have active cooling and keep your harddrive/pc safe from bumps, you have a good chance of keeping it running for much longer. I don't think it has much to do with age as much as the probability of continually dodging the bullet so to speak.

smart monitoring is useful but unfortunately virtually all values are pretty much vendor specific and indecipherable to the end-user and cannot be used to compare with other disks. There are only 2-3 parameters that are useful imo.

[Reenk Roink]

Cross your fingers and pray...

[Papewaio]

Or do as we professionals do and backup, backup, backup.

What you need to backup most of all is unique data as opposed to OS and applications.

If you have the orginal OS and apps you can always reload them on a new system... you may even skip that with a new system and just put the latest set on them.

Unique data is what you have entered and is unique to you. If it is data that you can freely download or get your hands on from other sources then I wouldn't consider it unique data. Unique data will be your Uni assignments, letters, photos and tragically saved game data (tragic that we care and even more tragic when you find out that you have to replay the entire game from scratch to get almost back to the end).

1) Back up unique data.
2) Check that the backup is readable. If possible check it on another PC... no point of having backups that can only be read by the machine that dies.
3) Look at backing up the rest of the data.
4) Look into what it takes to get a system image... maybe to much effort.

[Viking]

If you have active cooling and keep your harddrive/pc safe from bumps, you have a good chance of keeping it running for much longer. I don't think it has much to do with age as much as the probability of continually dodging the bullet so to speak.

smart monitoring is useful but unfortunately virtually all values are pretty much vendor specific and indecipherable to the end-user and cannot be used to compare with other disks. There are only 2-3 parameters that are useful imo.

Noted.

Or do as we professionals do and backup, backup, backup.

What you need to backup most of all is unique data as opposed to OS and applications.

If you have the orginal OS and apps you can always reload them on a new system... you may even skip that with a new system and just put the latest set on them.

Unique data is what you have entered and is unique to you. If it is data that you can freely download or get your hands on from other sources then I wouldn't consider it unique data. Unique data will be your Uni assignments, letters, photos and tragically saved game data (tragic that we care and even more tragic when you find out that you have to replay the entire game from scratch to get almost back to the end).

1) Back up unique data.
2) Check that the backup is readable. If possible check it on another PC... no point of having backups that can only be read by the machine that dies.
3) Look at backing up the rest of the data.
4) Look into what it takes to get a system image... maybe to much effort.

That was about my plan exactly, but I hadn`t thought of saved games. I must backup them as well, of course.

[Just A Girl]

HDD's can be recoverd about 89% of the time.
and only 10% of that includes Total data loss.

so by that i mean.
79.% of the time you can recover your broken hard disks wothout loosing all the data. (some data will usualy be lost)
then 10% of the time, you would loose all your data to recover the disk, but atleast its useable.

and about 11% of the time. Its ruined.

(most common way that hdd's Apear to be broken is that windows forgets what it is.
Simply remounting the drive within windows will fix that,)

And the most common thing to kill a hard disk outright.
is power failure. when the pc is writing to disk.
Or an electical surge as you pc reboots Automatically after a power failure.
(so try not to set bios to make your pc boot up 1st thing it receives power after a power failure)

Just try to skandisk and defrag 1ce a month at least to keep the disk as healthy as you can.

P.S

if your in the uk.
you can get a 200gb 7200rpm HDD from maplin for £75, (if you are worried about data loss and want a back up drive)

[Viking]

Hmm.. I think I still will take some backups. It`s best to be on the safe side.

[Just A Girl]

indeed i backup frequently.
I also back up my registry entry's just incase i only need to reinstall my OS.
and i dont need to format. (usual scenario)

So i simply reinstall windows,
run the reg file i made.
and all my games and progs work again without any more reinstalling.

[Papewaio]

If a HD truly dies to recover the data can cost in the thousands... the data recovery specialists will actually disect the HD and mount the individual plates to be read on recovery machines... expensive but worth it for business critical data... much smarter for such businesses to invest in raid array data storage and off site backups...