Unless your drive experiences excessive heat or physical trauma, it'll probably fail gradually. Newer solid-state drives (SSDs) don't have moving parts, but their storage cells degrade a little bit every time you write to them, meaning they too will eventually fail (though SSD reliability is much better than it used to be).

On older spinning drives, moving parts like the motor can degrade over time, or the drives' magnetic sectors can go bad. This is normal, especially after your drive is more than a few years old. It might be time to say farewell-but here's what you should do before it goes to the big data center in the sky.Įvery hard drive dies eventually, and when it's near death, you'll see the signs: strange noises, corrupted files, crashing during boot, and very slow transfer speeds all point to the inevitable end. It's starting to make clicking or screeching noises, it can't seem to find your files, and it's moving really slowly. Your hard drive hasn't been acting the same lately.

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