How healthy is your computer storage?

In our experience at the shop, computer issues tend to come in clusters. The most recent cluster we’ve seen? Dead and dying storage drives. There are many causes of drive failure: age of the medium, hours of usage, mechanical failures, even OS corruption can cause your drive to become unstable or unusable. Let’s talk about a couple specific instances where you, unfortunately, find out your drive has either died or is about to.

Scenario #1 – Your computer has been making intermittent noises for a little while, but you cannot pinpoint where they are coming from since they eventually stop. Then, one day, you turn on your computer and all you get is loud clicking noises and it does not boot – or you get the dreaded “OS not found” message on your monitor. This is what we see on the older spinning hard drives. The good news is that your data is most likely there and can be recovered. You should power the computer down and not engage the drive any more – it can only cause more damage. Check out our Data Recovery Services – we have the tools and knowledge to help save your precious photos and documents.

Scenario #2 – Newer computers don’t use spinning hard drives, they have solid state drives (fancy words to mean the data is stored on specialized chips). This has been great for increased speeds, and the lack of moving parts mean there are fewer things that can go wrong physically with the drive itself. However, the downside to this is that typically when these drives fail, there is little you can do to fix it unless you send it out to a specialized data recovery center where they can repair at a component level that goes beyond what most shops can handle. At that point it is all about the electronic components. Our micro-soldering specialist, Shaun, is able to tackle some of these issues. You can find more information about that over on the Specialized Hardware Repair page.

“Okay, okay, my drive is eventually toast” I can hear you saying. Fear not, for that isn’t always the case. You never know when a drive is going to fail, but you CAN take steps to mitigate that failure. Plan for drive failure. If it doesn’t fail? Awesome. If it does fail? Well, you need to rely on your data backup plan. You do have a data backup plan, right? There are plenty of ways to keep your data safe. Maybe you use OneDrive or iCloud for documents, photos and videos. If you use a Mac, you might use Time Machine. How about an external drive that you copy things to? There are a multitude of services that can store all your data online so that you never have to worry about data loss again. So what is the takeaway from this? I’m glad you asked. Keep reading.