 There are no excuses for this. The dog ate my homework wasn't good enough 20 years ago, and my hard drive died isn't good enough now. It doesn't make any sense that we still trust spinning metal discs to hold our vacation photos and videos, our homework, and our precious game saves. This stuff's important. And hard drives, they die all the time. Can you even tell how close your hard drive is to kicking the can? Well, what if I told you that there were several ways to know ahead of time? I'll tell you where to look and how to interpret it right after I tell you about our sponsor. War Thunder. War Thunder is an online military vehicle combat game that's free to play and a lot of fun. Learn more at the end of this video or try it for free with a special signup bonus at the link below. It's an unfortunate inevitability that once a hard drive comes off the assembly line, it'll never be as good again. Before you even open up the box it came in, and regardless of how much you baby your system once it's installed, your shiny new hard drive has already started down the path to failure, especially if it showed up loosely packed or without any kind of padding. And when they do eventually fail, the sting is just a little bit sharper than any other component. By far the easiest and cheapest way most of us can use to gauge the health of a hard drive is sound. So let's start there. It helps to have fans or any other source of noise unplugged, but you can even do this without an operating system. In fact, it's easiest to do this in the BIOS where nothing is being used. Hit that power button, mash the BIOS key, and it's time to play Doctor, no stethoscope required. You're listening for anything out of the ordinary. After hitting the power button, you'll hear the motor spin up and the drive perform a short self-test. In the BIOS, a gentle hum is typical, but there's a range of acceptable noises you can expect. If a drive's been sitting inactive, as a cold spare for example, being in close enough proximity to a source of vibration over a long period of time will alter the way it sounds when spinning. Anything a little higher pitched or whiny though, and especially any clicking or grinding noise when the drive is sitting there doing nothing, that is cause for concern. The only acceptable time for a hard drive to make noise like that is if you are intentionally making them do it. If you do hear something concerning and want to investigate further, good news. Audio cues aren't the only free sign you might be dealing with a failing hard drive. They can tell you themselves, but only if you know how to ask. Smart is a feature that's been included in virtually every hard drive since the introduction of the ATA 3 standard. It logs a whole host of facts about the drive, most crucially a simple good or no good status and the number of power on hours. One thing Smart can't tell you is where to get the short circuit hoodie. Only I can do that. There are a number of different ways you can check in on your smart data. If you're in a situation where you don't have a connection to the internet, the power of the command prompt has you covered. You won't get the same level of detail as a dedicated program, but this command will now put a simple one word answer that you can use in a pinch to determine if you want to continue using that drive. The other tool that you have access to within Windows and entirely offline is the event viewer. As the drive ages, read and write errors become more commonplace, and Windows will keep along of each occurrence. One or two of these warnings on their own is a fairly benign thing. The big red flag that you really don't want to see in the event viewer will be reallocated sectors. If you see any of these, you might want to investigate further or monitor more frequently because if the count is increasing with any regularity, that's a sign the drive is failing. If you're looking for a little more detail about your drive, you're going to need some software. Crystal disk info generally gets the spotlight for being free and user-friendly, but you can also consider Victoria, hard disk Sentinel, or HDTune. Most of these can run the integrated smart self-test, but those last two also have a paid pro version that give access to benchmarking and detailed error scanning should you want to take a more in-depth look at the health of the drive. Speaking of in-depth looks, if you want to take a peek behind the scenes at the LMG offices, we've got an exclusive up on Flowplane right now. These programs will show you the full depth of smart parameters and helpfully turn the one word answer we saw in the command prompt into a percentage figure, which you can sort of think of as a percentage of drive life remaining. Relevant stuff like power on count and hours are listed and so are the read and seek error rates and the reallocated sectors count we saw in the event viewers here too. You can also generally use these tools on an SSD, but the indicators of a failing SSD are very different to those of a failing hard drive. So your mileage may vary there. This is for hard drives today. Let's say you have a bit of a fascination with the more macabre side of life. Wanna watch your hard drive dial a little bit inside in real time? You can do that with HD Tim. The benchmark included in the free version is only for read bandwidth, but it can still tell you a fair bit. Once the benchmark is underway, any source of vibration on the drive under load will result in increased latency during read operations. Loud music, a high RPM fan, or even other nearby drives are all enough to cause read times to increase. This is why dedicated NAS drives exist. The last programs I'll mention here are specific to each hard drive manufacturer. Unless you want to update the firmware though, don't feel pressured to use only the program made by your drive manufacturer. Any of them will be capable of performing the basic maintenance tasks. There is one thing that all of the tools you have at your disposal for monitoring drive health have in common though. You need to be paying attention. Just like how expecting a person to remember to perform backups manually is an unreliable solution at best, so too is not checking in on your drives occasionally. So configure those backups to run automatically and keep your monitoring program of choice installed. We've set a reminder to let you know that it's time to check in. Now that you've got a toolbox that you can use to check on the health of your hard drives, let's talk about used drives. Like this 20 terabyte Exos Enterprise X20 from Seagate, which you may have seen take a tumble recently. We'll have a link to it and other similar drives down below. New ones though, never dropped. Unless people want that? Would people want that? You've probably read the advice online recommending you to stay far away from used drives, but in reality it's a much more gray area than you might think. And there are plenty of reasons why you might want to consider picking one up. Sometimes you just need something, anything, that just works regardless of speed or capacity. In that case, where the heck are you going to find a drive for $5? Or if you're just starting your voyage down the rabbit hole of data hoarding, how about paying half the price per gigabyte compared to new? It's a pretty compelling offer. As with any purchase of used products though, you do owe it to yourself to insist on seeing it in action before handing over any cash. In this case, first check to see that the disk is detected in the BIOS and the operating system. And then run your choice of software to check in on that smart data. The comfort level for something like the reallocated sector count will vary from person to person and drive to drive. For some, even one is too much, while others are happy with anything under 30. Every hard drive comes from the factory with reserved blocks to handle reallocated sectors, so it's a smart idea to check how many are remaining before proceeding. If the seller is patient, there's no harm in going as far as politely asking them to run an error scan too. Try to ask ahead of time so that the test is complete by the time you arrive though, instead of, you know, awkwardly standing around in a stranger's home waiting for it to hit 100%. Lastly, I keep referring to this because it is the right way to do things. But frankly, I would trust three used hard drives following a 3-2-1 backup plan much more than I would trust a single brand new hard drive. You should have three copies of your data on two different media types, and one of those should be off-site to be truly safe. So let's say it's too late, and the worst-case scenario has already occurred. Complete drive failure. Press F to pay respects. Even with careful monitoring, some drives will not at all say anything until they are moments from death. Thankfully, recovery from an event like this has been made much simpler than it used to be. Until recently, your only option would have been to take the drive to a data recovery specialist, or if you were lucky and had a fridge nearby, you might be able to do it yourself with a half-working drive. But now, if your data is in the cloud, then good news. It hasn't gone anywhere. Once you log in again, you'll find your cloud-compatible game saves and all your settings will be untouched, and any bookmarks you had will still be there too, as long as you didn't have all your passwords saved on that same hard drive. If you've gone through it once, you probably know that you never want to do it again. So keep your ears open and an eye on the drive monitoring software of your choice, and you should be able to avoid that situation from repeating itself. Trust me, guys, hard drive failure sucks. Unlike our sponsor. War Thunder. War Thunder is a free-to-play online military vehicle combat game. It's available on Windows, Mac, Linux, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X with cross-play. It features 10 playable nations and an incredible arsenal of more than 2,000 historically accurate playable tanks and aircrafts, and ships from the 1910s to vehicles still in service today. You'll compete in massive combined arms battles on over 100 major battlefields from World War II to modern environments. War Thunder's vehicles are implemented with a high level of authenticity and details, so their speed, armor, firepower, and model are as close to real life as possible without compromising on gameplay. It's still a game, guys. Their damage models are realistic and dynamic at adding a huge amount of depth that's rarely matched by other free-to-play games. So head to the link below and start playing War Thunder for free. You'll also get a free bonus premium vehicle just for signing up. Thanks for watching, guys. If you're looking for something else to watch, our tour of a professional data recovery center was really fascinating. That was a lot of fun.