Signs of a hard drive failure; Recently I doubted if my computer hard drive was faulty or safe. I took a moment to look at the problem and came to the conclusion that nothing bad had happened and I did not need to buy an expensive new hard drive or a high-speed document.
Examining your hard drive capabilities is a great way to spend a holiday evening, especially if you enjoy this type of work. But it does not take long to do this, and you will often find very quickly that your system hard drive is working fine from day one and does not need to be replaced or repaired. And of course, saving money and not buying unnecessary supplies makes great sense! This way we can spend our money on buying more essentials.
Signs of a hard drive failure
I use several computers on my computer and I have a 3TB hard drive next to them which I use to store games, backup files and large video images. For several weeks now, I have noticed that updates to several games on this Steam hard drive, such as Stellaris or The Elder Scrolls Online, are hard to do. Despite my high internet speed, downloads are difficult to complete and take a long time to complete. Sometimes downloading and installing these games takes up to an hour!
Worse, any kind of update on Steam makes it impossible for me to do anything else with the hard drive. I can not back up the file. Move my files or do anything else.
Although it seems to be a problem with Steam or a problem with bulky updates being downloaded poorly, I was also concerned that the hard drive was crashing. My hard drive was not broken yet, but I was thinking that maybe it would be the last days of using this hard drive, and it would be better to buy a newer and better hard drive before it burns or to relax and go to a large (and of course expensive) factory.
Before throwing away my hard drive, I decided to do a few tests to see how bad things were.
Chkdsk recipe is your friend!
The first and easiest thing you can do is use the Chkdsk command to find filesystem errors. Of course, you need more than this command to examine your hard drive more deeply, but this step can be a good first step in checking for errors.
Go to File Explorer, right-click on your drive, and select Properties. Go to the Tools tab and click Check in the Error-checking section.
Although Windows always does continuous scans to find hard drive problems, you can still do it manually to be more sure. It does not take long, although as many times you can not trust the displayed progress bar, but in general it does not take more than a few minutes.
In this process, Check Disk or chkdsk checks your drive’s file system. If you have extra time, you can have more adventure. In the Start menu, go to Command Prompt, then right-click on it and click Run as administrator.
Then type chkdsk in the window that opens, then enter a space, then type in the name of the drive you want, then f / (for auto-correction of errors) or r / (for scanning the entire disk, which takes longer). Add.
If you have to restart your system to run chkdsk, you can see the scan result later in the Event Viewer.
Use SMART
It stands for “Automated Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology”, a small system found on all drives you buy. This system measures various data about your drive and you can go to check the performance of your drive and see the danger signs. The problem is that SMART data is a little difficult to view, and some of the numbers may be a little difficult to understand, but fortunately there are software programs that display this data in an understandable way.
First, let’s take a look at the usual SMART report. I use HDDScan software to do this, which makes everything very simple:
If you see a lot of green options on this page, everything is fine and it means that none of the data is out of safe range. If some of the options have turned yellow, it means that there may be problems in that area. And if you see a red option, you should know that the results of your study contain problems, and you must be careful in those specific measurements to understand what they mean.
We suggest you pay more attention to the following five parameters. Many large companies use these five parameters to determine if their drives are failing:
- SMART 5 – Reallocated Sectors Count
- SMART 187 – Reported Uncorrectable Errors
- SMART 188 – Command Timeout
- SMART 197 – Current Pending Sector Count
- SMART 198 – Uncorrectable Sector Count
Although these options may be hard to remember, the values you need to remember are easy: چیزی Anything above zero is bad. Do not care about the worst column values in HDDScan.
Check the hard drive performance while transferring the file
There are several ways you can ensure the performance of your hard drive. The two main functions of a hard drive are reading and writing data. These functions can be checked by simply copying files between the hard drive and a faster drive. If this copy takes longer than usual, a job is definitely a problem.
You can also use various software to check the read and write performance of your hard drive. These softwares do not provide you with accurate information about the daily performance of your hard disk, but you can easily use them to determine if there is a problem with the file transfer or not.
Although the HDDScan software mentioned above can do the trick, I’m a fan of HD Tune. Simple software that is easy to use and provides this information in a graphic and attractive appearance. The initial version of this software is free and provides you with all the necessary features. However, in this version you can only check the performance of reading (not writing).
Launch the software to start and click Start. You can see the average, minimum and maximum transfer rates, as well as the access time (how long it takes for your hard drive to start transferring data, this number depends more than anything on the physical design of your hard drive) and the burst rate. ) Access.
I was a little curious as to why my drive’s burst rate was lower than the average transfer rate, and thought it might be due to poor motherboard settings (which is unlikely) or maybe the HD Tune software was malfunctioning. So I downloaded another piece of software to check this information again. The name of this software is CrystalDiskMark.
I got great results in reading and writing. The rest of the reviews took a long time.
CrystalDiskMark does not report burst rate. That’s why I went for HDTach, which is so old that it only works in Windows 10 in compatibility mode for Windows XP SP3! The burst rate was acceptable in this software and I finally saw that it is faster than the transfer rate.
The results of this software were inconsistent, so I decided to use another software called UserBenchmark.
These results show that my hard drive is performing very well. The results show that my hard drive is faster than 73% of the hard drives reviewed by UserBenchmark, which is a very good result.
So what was the problem?
Although I doubted from the beginning that Steam was a problem, checking the hard drive was a good exercise. Now I know that the hard drive is not a problem and although I would like to change it, it is no longer one of my priorities.
The solution to the Steam problem was also easy, I limited my downloads to only be done from midnight to 6 am. Also, if I am not going to use my system for a few hours, I will let these updates be done. This is a great solution so you don’t have to worry about slow drive speeds anymore. Hard disk read and write speeds have their limitations, and it is normal for you to have trouble doing multiple high-speed tasks.
