How To Tell If Your Hard Drive is Failing - Tech Tips

This is how you tell if your harddrive is dead or on it's deathbed. Also Linus walks through what to avoid in order to prolong the life of your hard drive. Finally, we suggest that users use SMART in order to test and keep up to date on the status of their drives. HD Sentinel is a great way to keep track of this automatically and it can warn you when something is wrong, or about to go wrong. It can even give you an estimated lifespan remaining on your drive, listed in number of days.

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[bryanchung]

My computer told me SMART detected a hard drive failure and I should back up the drive...that was 4 years ago and it still works.

[sonnyred]

This guy is definitely going to be famous in the future

[stefanhoffmann]

I have an age-old 80GB HDD laying around which sounds like a V8 trying to start when R/W'ing data. But it still works :D

[themegaman]

Finally, a video that actually tells you when the HDD fails, and what to exactly watch out for! Was getting concerned about the read/write clicking sound, but definitely don't hear that click of death I've seen on multiple videos. Fingers crossed that its okay, but have backed up data in case its getting ready to fail.

[yorgle]

I was looking at a technical manual for an old 1998 Seagate SCSI drive, and was really impressed by the amount of detail they went into.  As far as temperature, it specified acceptable temperatures for 4 different components, and gave a diagram of where to measure them on the drive.  For the head and disk assembly, this particular drive gave the maximum temp as 65C, but strongly recommended not exceeding 55C, and said that temperatures above 45C would reduce the operating life. They also gave an adjustment factor for altitude, and went on to discuss airflow.
Manuals I saw from the early/mid-2000s just give a maximum ambient air temperature surrounding the drive, not for any components of the drive itself, and give no guidance on the optimal range. They also give less detail on reliability.
Manuals for today's drives give even less information, and in many cases they aren't even manuals at all, they're just a 2 page pamphlet with a few basic specs in a chart. The old manuals were over 100 pages. They took their products a lot more seriously back then.

[djjesus.hediedforyourspins]

I still remember that damned day. The day all the porn disappeared. I remember it like it was yesterday.

[greycircularity]

Kingston SSD: Dies after 3 years

WD Green Hard Drive: Still alive after a decade

[aryanadvay]

Notice how Linus's haircut looks like a notch

[WolfHack]

So I left this tab to go back to it, and saw the tab labeled as "How To Tell If Your Hard" and was starting to question myself.

[ZachBrannigan]

Is it coincidental or ironic that my desktop hard drive failed while watching this video earlier today?

[._Murphy]

Looking back at this day, I'm just wondering, Linus hasn't aged at all!!

[brankerroberts]

I watch NCIX Tech Tips when I run out of things to watch on Linus Tech Tips

[MCatwar]

lol we booted up our DOS machines at our school and the 72mb hard drives literally started screeching and im like wow this hard drive sounds healthy.

[UbiMortus]

10 weeks ago I put to rest my 80GB WD HDD, that I have used for 10 years. For fire reasons.

[scandilad]

How to know your HD is failing: step 1# Check brand. step 2# if Seagate answer is yes, it's failing. step 3# if other brand check advanced guide.

[TheRyxas]

"Damn you, PHSYICS!"

Made me laugh.

[JamesBalazs]

*accidentally overclocked your SATA bus* XD I'd love to see what sort of tool tries to overclock their processor and ends up overclocking their SATA controller. I'm guessing Linus is talking from some sort of horrific overclocking experience there.

[yesitsmecsd]

love Linus videos...always informative while cracking me up! Such a rare combo!

[brokereigns]

Me trying to chill:

My hard drive: sounds of a hurricane

[sarathchelsea]

my Seagate 1tb survived 6 years and still working fine :) the only thing I didn't upgraded