Most components on a PC that can fail will give some warning of their deteriorating condition before they just stop working altogether, and hard drives are no exception. Note that this article is written with a Windows PC in mind, and the software tools I mention will generally be Windows-specific, but the general concepts discussed apply to Mac or Linux computers as well. In this article, I will show you how to prepare for the worst and the warnings you should look out for. Fortunately, there are some warning signs of an impending hard drive failure, and some things that you can do to protect yourself from a drive failure. When a hard drive fails, it can be anything from an annoyance to a catastrophe, depending on the backup system that was in place to keep that data safe and secure.
Today’s solid-state drives (SSDs) do not have any moving parts and so they last longer, but they too eventually wear out. All hard drives fail, because despite their connection to electronic devices, hard drives are (or were) mechanical in nature: a physical platter spins at thousands of revolutions per minute and a moving arm equipped with magnetic sensors reads magnetic pulses stored on the platter. The first hard drive hit the market in 1956 it was a 5-megabyte drive for an IBM mainframe, it weighed more than a ton, and it eventually failed.
