A hard drive failure is a nuisance at best and a tragedy at worst. You might have to reinstall your operating system and all your software, or get a new computer, or live with the loss of your important data - including years of photos! What if I said there's a way to predict this kind of failure?
Before we get any further, please: BACK UP YOUR DATA!! It's the most important thing a computer user can do.
The simplest way to check the health of your hard drive is to look at its S.M.A.R.T. information. S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. It's tech in computer hard drives that attempts to alert users to potential hard drive failure. It monitors dozens of details about a hard drive's performance in an effort to determine whether that hard drive may fail at some point soon.
Unfortunately, this information is a little buried. My favorite way of finding it is to use a program called Speccy. This neat (if somewhat geeky) tool gives you all the specifications about your computer that you could ever need. Download and install the free version. Then run it and click on "Storage." If the area under S.M.A.R.T. says "Good," then you're most likely ok. If it says anything else, that drive should be replaced as soon as possible.
It's hard to tell with 100% certainty whether a hard drive is going to fail or not. But S.M.A.R.T. tries to make an educated guess so that you have time to make plans about a replacement. It's widely accepted that if the S.M.A.R.T. readings tell you the drive is going bad, it's best to replace that drive. Google did a study which determined that if the S.M.A.R.T. readings reported a problem with a drive, that drive was 39 times more likely to fail than a drive with no problems detected.
In the end, if the S.M.A.R.T. reading says your drive is going to fail, assume it will. Call 3TG Tech Support today to ask about next steps. You might think about getting a new computer, or you might just need a Solid State Drive, which would be less expensive and a big upgrade. And all your programs, files and settings stay exactly where they are.
If the S.M.A.R.T. reading doesn't indicate a problem, your drive is much less likely to fail, but you should still be backing up your important data just in case!