It could be your gaming pride and joy, or it could be your essential kit for school. It might just be a mundane tool for your job. Whatever it’s used for, computers are expected to work without problems: fire them up and away you go. Hah, not so fast…
Like all electronic devices, PCs don’t last forever, and the parts inside them will eventually fail. While it’s easy to replace a broken device, the same can’t be said for the data stored in your machine. It should be said that in modern PCs that rely on solid storage, SSDs are generally more durable than HDDs. SSDs don’t have moving parts and they can withstand accidental drops and other shocks and vibrations in laptops better than HDDs ever could. However, SSDs can fail, too, as do other forms of flash memory.
Here are five signs that you should keep an eye out for (or an ear), warning you that the drive storing your documents is nearing its end.
1 – That doesn’t sound right
Modern storage drives are manufactured to very high tolerances, especially hard disk drives (HDDs). Despite having platters that rotate at thousands of rpm and arms that flick back and forth in milliseconds, today’s HDDs are designed to be near silent in their operation.
You might be able to hear faint whirring and clicking as the drive is working, but that’s all — so anything louder than that, is a sign that things are not well (or that it’s just an old design). And if you hear any high-pitched metallic noises, loud or otherwise, then the drive will probably be damaged inside.
. Classic signs to listen out for are loud clicks, buzzing sounds, or the storage disc just constantly spinning up and down.</p>
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, are just a collection of chips on a circuit board. Needless to say, you shouldn’t hear <em>anything</em> from these.</p>
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 to minimize this problem, but they vary in terms of effectiveness. USB memory sticks typically have a much shorter lifespan than SSDs, so you should expect them to fail without much warning.</p><p>So if a drive does start to lose the odd file here and there, you should consider replacing it quite soon — depending on how old the drive is, the need to do this might not be as urgent as with a screeching HDD, but don’t ignore the faults. Once again, backup any vital data that’s stored on them. Oh, and you should <em>never</em> use a USB memory stick as a critical backup device! Stick to HDDs <em>and </em>cloud storage for this job.</p><h2>3 – Boy, this is taking its time…</h2><p>While not as immediately obvious as a drive screaming its death throes from the bowels of your computer, a sudden change in overall performance can be a sign that your storage drive failing. PC hardware like CPUs, RAM or GPUs do not get slower over time. Besides the possibility of cooling fans malfunctioning and having the chips throttling because of that, hardware should perform the same. On the software side though, that’s where things can take a sour turn due to an accumulation of data, more programs loading on the background, and the operating system getting bogged down after years of updates.</p><p>But if the machine was working away happily one day, and then suddenly taking a very long time to boot up or access files, there’s something clearly amiss. HDDs eventually do fail and SSDs can fail, too, and show those signs in different ways. Errors involving bad blocks will show in both types of storage and that’s usually when it takes an unusually long time to read or write a file and the process ends in failure, so the system eventually gives up with an error message.</p>
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, the best way to deal with it is by taking preventative actions: namely, just have the operating system on one drive, and store all important files on a separate one (or always keep a separate backup of critical files).</p><h2>5 – Glitches in the matrix</h2><p>The last sign we’ll talk about, for a Dodo-esque storage drive, is perhaps the most indeterminable one. In other words, if you’re experiencing these particular symptoms, then it <em>could</em> be the drive that’s faulty, but there’s a myriad of other causes that would need to be eliminated first.</p><p>We’re referring to those situations where your computer just plain ol’ bails out — in the case of Windows, it’s the infamous blue screen of death (BSOD). This screen is shown by the operating system when it’s reached a point where it’s simply unable to continue functioning properly.</p>
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 with a piece of advice: it’s always better to be prepared, than be caught out. And by that, we mean you should make regular backups of your important files, and if they’re <em>really</em> important, backup the backups!</p></div><p><a class=)
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