A person experiences the signs or symptoms in a somewhat regular progression. None of the symptoms they experience will suddenly appear and say “I am a disk failure.” It is common for the hard drive to have been degrading for weeks before someone makes this connection.
All mechanical problems will worsen with each passing moment the drive is running. All performance and logical errors provide a window of opportunity. Placing your symptom into the right one of these categories is really the whole decision.
It slows down. Taking longer to open your file(s); brief pause while saving; extended time to boot. The drive is constantly trying to read data on multiple retries at bad sectors until it finally succeeds after many attempts. Weeks of warnings.
The noise changes. New whining sounds; random ticking sounds; new start-up noises that were previously absent. Not yet the dreaded “click-of-death”, but the same internal components are beginning to struggle.
Files misbehave. Files will sometimes not be able to open or there will be damaged blocks in an image file or a folder can have no files listed. The file system is fine, but the underlying storage areas for that file system are not.
SMART reports errors. These include reallocated sectors, pending sectors and uncorrectable errors. When any of those values begin increasing then the drive is failing regardless of other information SMART provides about its condition.
It disappears intermittently. It will sometimes disappear from your computer and return after a reboot. This is often the final sign of a failing drive before it stops coming back altogether.
Look at the SMART data. CrystalDiskInfo on Windows and DriveDx on a Mac can read SMART info without installing anything to stay on your computer. The three SMART fields that need to be checked are reallocated sector count, pending sectors, and uncorrectable errors.
Next, determine if the drive still mounts. If so, get a backup copy of your most critical documents right now, before continuing. A failing drive which still reads is a great thing and will not continue to be this way for long.
Then stop using it now. Not after you're done with what you're doing. Every hour a drive that is degrading stays in service will take away readable sectors you may want back.
Unknowable. And we are being honest. Could be months. Could be tomorrow. Certainly it will not get better. Copy off all of your data today.
No. It writes to the same hard drive it is checking, and when you're checking a drive with bad sectors, the write operation frequently fails. This is the most typical case of a recoverable drive becoming a partially recoverable one.
A slow drive for an extended period of time with no apparent reason for being so slow is often due to the drive trying to access areas that are damaged. Eventually, every attempt at accessing those areas will succeed. The slowdown you experience is just each time the drive attempts to access the damaged area. This is an indication of damage before it completely fails.
If the drive still mounts and you have another disk available, then copying your files from the damaged disk to the good disk via a sector-by-sector copy method using an error skip mode instead of a retry mode would be reasonable. As a general rule, do not use any software application that repeatedly reads damaged areas.
Yes. A new mechanical sound signifies components are moving in ways they shouldn't be. Turn it off immediately and don’t finish whatever task you had started to do with it.
In terms of pricing, nothing will change (from £300 +VAT). The issue is simply how much you’ll get back, and that isn’t something that can be fixed by using money.