Summary

Mechanical hard drives fail because thanks to physical damage, overheating, everyday wear and tear, and more. Take care of your drive with cleaning, cooling, and diagnostic testing, and make backups of important files so you’re prepared for the worst.

Nothing lasts forever, and that’s especially true for mechanical hard drives. Some might run faithfully formore than a decade, while others will meet their end far too soon. So how do failures happen, and is there anything you can do to prevent them?

The Many Ways Hard Drives Fail

Mechanical hard drives are sensitive, precision electromechanical devices. Really, it’s a miracle that they work at all, let alone as reliably as they do. That being said, there are many different ways your mechanical drive can meet its end:

Scary stuff! There are other more creative ways for a drive to snuff it, but your dearly departed drives most likely met their end in one of these ways.

The Warning Signs of Drive Failure

Clearly, there are many ways for a hard drive to shuffle off the mortal coil, often without any clear warning. In some cases, however, you will get enough warning to prepare for failure.

There are several common symptoms of mechanical drive failure:

It’s important to note that other issues, such as software problems or hardware issues unrelated to the hard drive, can also cause these symptoms. If you are experiencing any of these symptoms, running a diagnostic test on your hard drive is a good idea to determine the cause.

How to Prevent Hard Drive Failures

Prevention is better than a cure! There are several steps you can take toprevent mechanical drive failure:

you may also consider usinga RAID array of drives. If you use a RAID setup with redundancy, then one drive can fail without any of your data being lost. It’s highly unlikely that two drives will fail at the same time, giving the opportunity to replace the faulty drive with a fresh one.

What to Do When a Hard Drive Fails

If the worst happens and a mechanical drive does fail, it’s not necessarily the end of the road. Here are some options forrecovering datafrom a failed drive and getting the drive up and running again:

It’s important to note that data recovery is not always successful, and it’s always best to have a backup of your data to ensure that you don’t lose important information in the event of a drive failure.