I want to show you a couple of tips here on checking a hard drive. This isn’t a good scenario to show you how. You should be using different tools and actually verify the consistency whether it be the performance of the hard drive. Western Digital comes up and it shows as you could read the drive. Run a check this but the customer has been having some issues with the computer.

So one of the things we do here is we run hard drive tests. This is our primary hard drive test right here.  You have seen videos on this for sure which is hard drive Sentinel. You can go online if you want to get that and this is the drive right there, the WDC 931. Health is 87% you know good to go. We continue right along but here we couldn’t continue we kept having problems so go a little bit deeper. This gives you a little bit more detail. Here for 17 days, if you look at this it’s almost like a new drive.

A couple of bad sectors but that’s common you can have some bad sectors that’s going to be fine. So we continue along with the unit continuing to have problems. We are going to do some double and triple verification’s on this drive.

One of the secondary tools that we use is Western Digital Lifeguard Diagnostics. When it comes up I am going to show you that initially it does a quick smart test. This is like the last one there on the bottom. It gives us a pass so I would say we are good. But we are going to run this quick test. We want to select it, run here to run the test and that is going to ask you quick or extended which takes a long time. So usually if there is a problem that would fail that quick test, let’s run that. That was a positive fail so the quick test failed that’s not good. Right off the bat right there I’d call it a bad drive but let’s go a little further just for this video sake and training sake.

Another tool that we use this is HD trio. So this is a trio of hard drive tools right here. We are going to go down here and find it there and a couple of things that you can do is error scan, we can look at the heath there which is not going to help. But really what we need is a benchmark. The bad [03:16] is going to back to the speed that its running at and with that you can have an idea what’s going on if this is really jagged you know 30 -0 and things like that. It could be a problem but the worse problem is when it fails to complete and I had already did this so I know what’s coming and this one is going to fail it and at this point so I am going to pause this and come back.

We are back, that test failed as well. So regardless of everything else that’s already two strikes and you’re out. This computer came in because it was having some issues with the screen freezing up, etc. So apparently it was a hard drive problem or multiple problems. But one of the points that I want to make here as far as bad hard drives and one of the things that we stress to customers is before we start working on your computer we always request doing a backup. Actually we did do the backup and this computer also started blue screening and this hard drive itself went into a loss state as well which is unreadable. 3 different tools useful for hard drives . The first one primarily said it was good but we dug a little deeper and we got ourselves a bad hard drive.

Your hard drive can go bad at anytime. Learn how to spot one here.