How often should you check your hard drive health?

Everyone generates a huge amount of data daily, and it needs to be stored securely in our devices’ storage. But whether that’s an external drive used on a Mac, a hard drive inside a NAS, or an SSD inside a Windows PC, our storage drives won’t last forever, even if we want our data to. There are many utilities for checking the built-in S.M.A.R.T. monitoring data that every hard drive and SSD produces, but how often should you check that data to avoid failing drives? Let’s answer that, and show you which tools to use to check your hard drive’s health.

When to check your hard drive’s health

Often, but not too often

While it might be harder to find a new PC with a mechanical hard drive (HDD) these days, that doesn’t mean they’re gone. With the average lifespan of an HDD being five years, plenty will still be in active use, and that’s not counting media servers or NAS devices, where the large capacities of HDDs still reign supreme. All of these drives have in-built monitoring for overall health, as well as things like reallocated sectors which indicate a failure might be coming. SSDs are less prone to some of the things that damage HDDs, but also wear over time and many of the monitoring programs still apply.

Source: XDA

There aren’t any concrete rules about when to check your hard drive’s health, but it’s wise to check regularly so you get advance warning of any potential failing drives. I like to check once every month or two, but if any of the following symptoms occur I’ll check straight away so I can stave off the potential of data loss.

• Slowly loading files or folders
• Drive disappears from Disk Management
• Strange noises like clicking, chirping, or screeching sounds from the drive
• Notifications of files not being accessible
• Increasing application crashes
• BSODs or boot failures

If the testing from either the inbuilt pass/fail, the manufacturer’s own software or third-party utilities shows bad sectors, lots of reallocated sectors, or any numbers next to the other attributes that have “error” in their names, I’ll order a replacement drive and start on saving my data elsewhere. To check, I tend to prefer the manufacturer’s software, as it can tell me if I need to update drive firmware and other potential issues.

But if you prefer third-party, you can use CrystalDiskInfo, which will show the detailed S.M.A.R.T. data for your drive. Just be warned that not every attribute is supported by every hard drive manufacturer, and the list of attributes used by SSDs is even smaller.

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Keep your data safe by periodically checking your hard drive health

Keeping an eye on the health of your storage drives is essential for not having to pay for expensive data restoration services. If any of the drive monitoring tools say anything other than OK, it’s time to order a replacement drive, and save your data from the failing drive. When doing so, go into the drive and copy your most important data first, onto another storage drive. Then, try doing a full disk image of the failing drive, so you have a full copy saved when your new replacement drive arrives. It’s essential to do the smaller copy of crucial data first, as you don’t want to risk straining the hard drive and having a failure while doing a full-disk copy.

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