Dying Hard Drive but System Not Slowing Down?

[Fafaagasta]

Simple question. Is it possible for Hard Drive to die without system slowing down symptom? I just want to make sure...

 

[mazboy]

short answer: yes.

 

[Fafaagasta]

Then nobody really safe 🙁

 

[scout_03]

the best way to find it use is maker software to test it does it made any clicking sound .

 

[topheron]

Most hard drives in my experience suddenly fail. You turn on your computer and it goes click click click, or you turn on you computer and it says something about hard drives on the bios screen and completely freezes.

Once in a while I get a hard drive that gives me warning, but this has happened for me maybe 10% of the time. I've replaced several hundred hard drives (I work on equipment that uses hard drives).

If you do hear 'click click click' or when booting it says errors were detected, but you still can get the hard drive to boot, on THAT BOOT you need to back up everything you can. Start with the most important things first. Seriously, you will likely not get any other chances.

My personal scheme right now is to buy a 4tb internal hard drive AND a 4tb external drive and regularly back up the internal drive.

Don't trust SSD's, they fail by bricking with no warning.

Don't trust high capacity thumb drives as your backup media, they fail with no warning.

And certainly don't trust a hard drive. They are guaranteed to fail.

Backup. Backup at least two places, and preferably three places with one backup stored off-site.

It's the only way to have some confidence that your stuff won't be lost.

 

[mazboy]

Win10 makes it so easy to stick an extra HDD into your case and back up to it, automatically, at intervals that you can set to suit yourself, that there is no reason to ever get caught out. Go to settings->Update & Security->Backup

Make sure "Automatically back up my files" is turned on. Click on "More Options". Set the interval, the folders you want to back up, and the target drive.

Of course, you can do the same thing to an external HDD, but "cable management". And just in case, I also backup my data to an external HDD once a week, and do a system image (of all the drives in my case) once every couple of weeks (or before Microsoft drops a new Insider Preview version on me).

 

[derekullo]

In my experience hard drives tend to die slowly.

At work I am responsible of about 800 computers, mostly Dell Optiplex's.

For every 1 hard drive that dies without warning we have about 10 or so that die slowly.

The telltale sign that the hard drive is dying is a slow logon not caused by Windows Updates.


As for the original question;

It is entirely possible for a hard drive to die without warning, but it is exceedingly rare compared to a hard drive that dies slowly with over the course of a week, with ever increasing slowness. (Assuming nothing traumatic happens to the hard drive, like being dropped.)

Electronic failures tend to follow a bell curve, with high failures at the beginning followed by a period of time with little failures and more failures as the product gets older.

Dell tests their computers, at least the business Optiplex, before they ship so it is extremely rare that we get a computer that doesn't work off from the beginning.


I have a 250 gigabyte drive in a computer from 2002 that still runs great.

I've had 4 terabyte Western Digital Reds not work upon arrival, DOA.

I have 4 terabyte Western Digital Reds that still run as they did in 2014.

 

[derekullo]

Don't trust SSD's, they fail by bricking with no warning.

Don't trust high capacity thumb drives as your backup media, they fail with no warning.

And certainly don't trust a hard drive. They are guaranteed to fail.

So we can't trust SSDs, thumb drives or hard drives?

I guess that just leaves compact flash, dvd and blu-ray. Lol


In all seriousness;

Solid state drives are more reliable than hard drives due to having no moving parts.

An SSD like the Intel DC P3600 has an unrecoverable error rate of 1 sector per 1e17 or 1 error roughly every 12.5 Petabytes.

https://ark.intel.com/products/80999/Intel-SSD-DC-P3600-Series-800GB-2_5in-PCIe-3_0-20nm-MLC


Enterprise class hard drives like the Western Digital Gold are only rated to 1 secter per 1e15 or 1 error roughly every 125 Terabytes.

https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_assets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-800074.pdf

Mathematically solid states are literally 100 times more reliable than hard drives, 1e17 / 1e15.


At the very least you should have a raid 1 to protect you from a hard drive or (a highly rare) SSD failure.

A raid 1 makes recovery from a bad hard drive painless and easy.

You simply pop in a new hard drive / SSD and the other drive mirrors over a copy of itself.

Even having a 1e17 URE solid state drive is not a backup.

Without a backup you are vulnerable in the time it takes to resync the drives, not to mention a virus corrupting / encrypting / erasing your data.


At work out of our 800 or so computers, about 100 of them have solid state drives, Optiplex 9020s(sata) and 7040s (M.2).

After about 2 years I have not received one complaint of a solid state failing in one of those computers.

The occasional power supply yes, but never an ssd ... so far

 

[Fafaagasta]

In my experience hard drives tend to die slowly.

At work I am responsible of about 800 computers, mostly Dell Optiplex's.

For every 1 hard drive that dies without warning we have about 10 or so that die slowly.

The telltale sign that the hard drive is dying is a slow logon not caused by Windows Updates.


As for the original question;

It is entirely possible for a hard drive to die without warning, but it is exceedingly rare compared to a hard drive that dies slowly with over the course of a week, with ever increasing slowness. (Assuming nothing traumatic happens to the hard drive, like being dropped.)

Electronic failures tend to follow a bell curve, with high failures at the beginning followed by a period of time with little failures and more failures as the product gets older.

Dell tests their computers, at least the business Optiplex, before they ship so it is extremely rare that we get a computer that doesn't work off from the beginning.


I have a 250 gigabyte drive in a computer from 2002 that still runs great.

I've had 4 terabyte Western Digital Reds not work upon arrival, DOA.

I have 4 terabyte Western Digital Reds that still run as they did in 2014.

People said Seagate harddrives are bad, but I have this old 320gb seagate from 2008 and still runs normally til now. But you have that 250gb from 2002, legend.

 

[mazboy]

I've been thinking about the whole "dies fast" v s "dies slow", and, I think the problem is in the setting. In a professional IT setting (that probably includes software that checks HDD performance against a list of "failure" variables), with access to TBF info, a dying HDD is easy to diagnose as it slowly dies.

Us poor reprobates, outside that arena, are lucky to discover a dying HDD as it rattles loudly over the sound of the case, CPU and GPU fans (not to mention the kids screaming in the other room...). All HDDs dies suddenly. It's the process that most of us miss...

 

[derekullo]

We monitor disk usage with our tools, but not disk performance.

Any issues that come up are from some one calling and saying their hard drive broke / is slow.