How to know if the Hard Drive is Damaged

Stop wondering how to know if the hard drive is damaged, be it an HDD or an SSD, and find out for yourself.

We help you in the process to detect failures and offer you the most useful solutions, the sooner the better!

HDDs and SSDs differ not only in their operation, but also in giving warnings that they are damaged.

How to know if the Hard Drive is damaged

Here below, we are going to look at the ways to know if our hard drive is damaged, emphasizing the symptoms that may arise while using them.

See Also: How to Choose an External Hard Drive for PS5

Unusual failures: Crashes, Errors, Noises, Screenshots or Functionalities

To begin with, we must sharpen our senses and pay more attention than usual to these phenomena because they may not be a failure of Windows, but of the hard drive.

We refer to the crashes, to the most frequent errors that we did not have before, and that we have not installed new programs.

Logically, they always have to be put into context to know how if the hard drive is damaged, or if it is just due to lack of updating. So take a look at these behaviors:

• That a program installed on the HDD or SSD closes frequently without us doing it.
• Unexpected error messages in programs that we are using and that are installed on our suspicious hard drive.
• Noises, clicks, or buzzes from the unit. In relation to this anomaly, take a look at our entry on the click of death, a clicking sound produced in HDDs that herald’s bad news.
• Blue Here it is important that you stay with the error message and then search for it on Google because it will help us identify the problem.

1. Data Loss

Related to the previous symptom, we have to check if we have recently lost data, regardless of their size. This is quite common for those mechanical hard drives that are approaching their death sadly.

That is where we have to sharpen our attention because the disappearance of files leads to a total alarm so that we can prepare ourselves: make a backup.

2. Overheating

Don’t know how to know the temperatures of your hard drive? Try installing HWMonitor or HWiNFO, two free tools that allow you to know the temperatures and status of your components.

As more specific alternatives, you can use CrystalDiskInfo, which gives you an overview of the status of your drives.

How do we know if a hard drive is overheated? Well, their temperatures usually range from 30-40º, but if it is above 40ºC … I would be worried. Of course, it should be noted that this can happen because our equipment has poor ventilation.

What to do if our equipment has poor ventilation? Put these tips into practice:

• Clean the PC: Open it completely, take out the components and clean them one by one.
• Monitor temperatures after doing so.
• Ventilation curves on heatsinks, GPU and auxiliary fans.
• Monitor again.

3. Poor Performance in transfer Speeds

To measure the performance of the SSD or HDD, understood as the transfer speeds, you can try CrystalDiskMark. We do not recommend passing this test multiple times because it reduces the life of the drive, but it is useful to know what speeds it offers.

We recommend that you know the transfer speeds of your unit before passing the test to be able to check that there is a worse performance.

In 3.5″ HDDs, do not expect to see more than 170-180 MB/s in reading, while in 2.5-inch SSDs, the normal range is between 300-500 MB/s; already in the M.2 NVMe SSDs … about 3000 MB/s if they are PCIe 3.0 and another 5000-7000 MB/s if they are PCIe 4.0.

See Also: How to Clone a Hard Drive in Windows 11

We also talk about worse performance when it takes time to load certain content, open folders, etc. There it is clear that something is happening, and you would start doing backup.

4. Bad Sectors

What are sectors? Parts of the HDD surface where data is stored. Miguel already told us what a bad sector is on a hard drive and how they are created. The question is how do I know my HDD has bad sectors?

The symptoms are:

• Windows or OS shutdown
• Malware
• Accidentally hitting our PC while the HDD was writing data. This can cause the head to contact the disk surface, damaging the disk.
• That as a result of a blackout or power outage the sector is damaged.

It is another way to know if the hard drive is damaged, so we advise you to take into account this problem, which is not uncommon in mechanical hard drives.

5. “Bad Data” Error

This is an alert or alarm that the drive does not have much time before it becomes unusable. This does not mean that the hard drive is damaged, but rather that it may die soon due to purely “natural” reasons.

So, make a backup before it fails again because the life time can be a matter of months, weeks or days. Even if you are in doubt about this, using Data Lifeguard Diagnostic or CrystalDiskInfo will help you to know the health of the HDD.

To say that this is a SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) warning, a Windows function that monitors information on hard drives (whether HDD or SSD).

6. HDD or SSD is not recognized

First, don’t panic because this has happened to me in different ways and there are different culprits in each case. I am going to give you a series of checks and circumstances that you must take into account when this happens.

The HDD or SSD where the OS is installed is not recognized

There are 2 scenarios here:

• Not even the motherboard detects the hard drive.
• Let it be detected, but not start from it.

In the first case, we will have to tinker with the connection of the unit: SATA or M.2 slot. If it’s the former, try connecting the SSD or HDD to another SATA port and check again; in the case of the second, disconnect and reconnect.

Still not recognized? Going back to the SATA connection, take a good look at the SATA connection from the source to the hard disk because this is often the solution (be careful with the adapters).

The only thing that occurs to me in M.2 SSD drives is that you clean the port well, that you check that the form factor is compatible with said slot and that you update the BIOS.

See Also: How to remove the Hard Drive from a Laptop

Let’s go with the second case, and that is that the main suspect is a boot error, especially if it has stopped starting overnight. In my experience, I’ve found that the drive was fine, just had a Windows boot error that needed to be fixed.

To do this, you have to use the Windows installation wizard (bootable USB, start, etc.). If you don’t know how to do it, take a look at how to repair startup in Windows 10.

7. Secondary HDD or SSD is not recognized

We are in the scenario where we have the main unit perfectly identified, recognized and functional, but the backup SSD or HDD is not detected. As we will have Windows working at 100%, we are going to do the following:

• We open the start menu and look for disk manager (Create and format disks, in Windows 10).
• You will see all the installed units (including flash drives or external HDD), so we are going to look for the problem unit.
• Notice that in the ability to correctly identify the unit, which should be in black and not with the blue stripe.
• If it is black, it is not formatted or unallocated. If this happens to you overnight and you had data inside… bad business because for Windows to recognize it, you have to have it formatted on the drive.

On the other hand, it might just be a driver problem, so do the following:

• Open the start menu and search for device
• Arrived here, look for the unit that gives problems to right click on it and give it to “update driver”.
• Finished the process, restart the PC.
• If it’s still not recognized, update Windows from the update center because that might fix it.

We hope these tips and solutions have been helpful to you. If you have any specific problem, you can contact us below and we will respond shortly.