Disk Drive Maintenance
While it is possible for every piece of hardware in your PC to fail, your hard disk drives are the most likely to die. Hard disks are the only components with moving parts that are constantly running in your computer, and like anything that has moving parts, they can wear out. With today’s hard drives getting bigger and bigger, it gets more expensive to develop drive parts that are both precise and robust. Nearly all consumer hard drive warranties are 1-year, but the average replacement time for a PC is about three years. Since only a hard drive crash can actually destroy your data, this means your PC will spend 2/3rds of its time with the most data-critical component unprotected by the manufacturer - and if the manufacturer won’t provide a warranty for the device you can bet there’s a reason.
Your computer manufacturer may cover the whole computer for three years, if you bought the extended warranty, but that won’t save your data. If you don’t have a data backup plan, you should read my blog entry Backing Up is Hard To Do. If losing your data forever is a problem, then you need a backup system. The next thing to do is read the rest of this blog, where I’ll explain how to maintain your hard drives and find out ahead of time if they are going to fail.
Checking for Errors
There are several ways you can check for errors on your drive. First, you should get a free utility to check your drive called HD Tune. HD Tune can read information on your drive, perform an error check and run speed tests. While most of the information is highly technical, HD Tune will sum up your drive’s health as ‘OK’ if everything is running fine. If not, it’s probably time to consider a new drive. Hard drive failures tend to be exponential - the first few errors may happen over a long period of time but once the number of errors goes up, it’s usually not long before the hard drive goes belly up.
After checking the overall health of your drive, run an error scan on each disk to check for physical errors on the hard drive. If you have any, the end is probably near. Most modern hard drives leave extra “sectors” blank so that data can be moved to those sectors when another sector becomes defective, but there are only so many of these and again, hard drive failures tend to start small and get big fast. If you see any errors you should make sure you have your data backed up and re-check the drive at least a couple days a week.
The next thing to check is the Event Viewer. Right-click on My Computer, select Manage, and open the Event Viewer folder. Click on the System log and sort by the Source column. Look for errors listed under ‘disk’ - if you find any, open them and look for the words ‘bad block’. If you have these errors then disk failure could be hours away.
The last check to run is chkdsk. This utility runs the next time you restart your computer and you can schedule a scan by running chkdsk /f from the command line (Start, Run…, type cmd and hit enter). You will be asked if you want to schedule a scan for the next time Windows starts - hit Y to confirm or N to cancel the scheduled scan. You can also specify the drive you want to check using chkdsk d: /f, where d: is the letter of the drive to check (don’t do CD-ROM drives).
Defragmentation
Defragmentation is essentially the only thing you can do to a hard drive to improve its performance that doesn’t involve highly technical and potentially dangerous tools. However it is especially critical to do if you have a drive that is getting full (more than 60%) or if you’ve got a lot of small files on the drive. Since your system drive will have a lot of of small, frequently used files (not to mention all the temp files that Windows throws around), you should defragment it at least once a month.
If you still have the Computer Management window open from looking at the Event Viewer, check out Disk Defragmenter next. Defragmenting a drive multiple times does little harm (although it does exercise the drive more than it would have been), but if you’ve defragmented recently and just want to check, hit the Analyze button to see what your drive looks like. Big blocks of blue are good - tiny lines of blue or red are not. Windows will tell you if you need to defragment or not, but depending on the files that are fragmented you may want to do it anyway, or if there are a lot of lines scattered everywhere. Blocks of data are easier for your hard drive to read as it doesn’t have to jump around as much.
If the drive is pretty bad, Windows will not organize everything into nice neat blocks in order to save time. If you really want your drive fully defragmented and have all the data organized toward the front of the drive, you may have to run the defragmenter several times.
Is it Really Dead?
Sometimes, a failing power supply (another component prone to failure) can cause hard drive errors in the event log (they may listed as ‘atapi’ in the Source field), poor hard drive performance or clicking sounds as the hard drive resets itself. In this case your hard drive may not be failing - yet. Bad power can ruin a hard drive just like old age can. While power supplies are harder to replace, they are usually covered under the manufacturer’s warranty. So if you have these symptoms, backup all your data and call your computer manufacturer right away. Hopefully they’ll recognize it as a power supply failure and replace the part for you.
July 4th, 2007 at 11:07 am
Very nice writeup. Completely agree with you on the limitations of the HDD. After all how much stress can a mechanical device bear. I can say from my own unpleasant experience of a severly fragmented drive. I continued to work on a badly fragmented drive without doing anything about it. The result was that after displaying the obvious signs of illness ( crashes and hangs), it just gave up on me. And with a drive that was so crapped, one can imagine the chances of data recovery.
July 6th, 2007 at 7:47 am
You can actually automate the disk defragmentation process if you use Diskeeper pro. It has a cool set-it-and-forget-it mode, which automatically monitors the fragmentation levels on your drives (even multiple drives) and defragments it as required when it finds free system resources to do so. The good part is that it doesnt interfere with other programs that are running because it runs as a low priority process. Even the manual defrags are pretty fast, if you wish to go down that route. Diskeeper Pro is not free, but is well worth the money IMHO if you dont want to deal with the hassle of manually defragging your PC. There are trial versions at their website if you want to give it a spin.
July 20th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
Thanks utility and S. Chu. I may check out Diskeeper Pro based on your recommendation. Defragmenting regularly helps to keep data reads and writes more linear which will lengthen the life of the disk.