Failed hard drives.

It’s not a case of IF a hard drive fails, it’s WHEN a hard drive fails. This pictures shows the failed or failing hard drives that I have replaced for customers in the last few months, and believe me it’s not a happy picture. If your data is important to you then you need to protect it, back it up, have it on the cloud, have it on another device. It’s often said, if you don’t have your data in three places, you don’t have it. My most common repair job at WM-tech? Yup, failed hard drives.

The most common signs of a failing hard drive are an overheating computer, strange noises (like clicking or whirring sounds), and data or file corruption. Hard drive failure symptoms can quickly lead to major problems, so you should act immediately to save your files and prevent any data from being lost. Old school spinning disk hard drives tend to fail the most as they have moving mechanical parts and are susceptible to shock and wear on mechanical components. SSD’s apart from being much faster, quieter, draw less power are generally more reliable but they can wear out and fail too.

If you’re using a computer with all your data on a single hard drive, it’s basically a disaster waiting to happen. It might not fail today, or tomorrow, but it WILL fail at some time. Please consider backing up to an external drive and optionally a cloud storage service. Even a backup to a usb stick/pen drive is better than nothing.

If you start getting weird errors, don’t delay, contact me today. 😉 I can arrange data backups, diagnose and if needed replace your hard drive, do a clean install of Windows or Mac OS and restore your data, as well as advise about backup solutions.

If your hard drive does fail, with either your computer not booting or corrupted Windows then in some cases I can recover data from a failed drive, it’s always worth trying and I offer a no data, no fee service on data recovery.