How to Tell if Your Hard Drive is Failing

By Dayton PC Repair Team · Published May 26, 2026

Your Computer is Acting Strange

You are sitting at your desk when suddenly the mouse cursor freezes for three seconds. Then, a blue screen appears or your MacBook Pro Retina simply refuses to boot into macOS. These moments feel like a sudden interruption to your life because you have work to finish or photos to organize. While a software glitch might be the culprit, these specific symptoms often point toward a dying storage drive.

A failing NVMe SSD or an aging mechanical hard drive doesn’t always die in a single instant. Most drives give you warning signs through slow file transfers, strange clicking sounds, or files that simply disappear from your folders. If you notice your Windows 11 laptop taking five minutes to reach the desktop when it used to take thirty seconds, you should pay attention.

Your data is currently at risk.

Try These Quick Self-Checks First

Before you panic and start reinstalling your operating system, you need to run a few basic tests. We often see customers who think their hardware is broken when they actually just have a corrupted file system or a bad driver. You can perform several checks from your own living room to rule out the easy stuff.

First, check your cables if you are using an external drive. A loose USB-C connection or a frayed SATA cable can mimic the behavior of a failing disk. If you are using an external Western Digital or Seagate drive, try plugging it into a different port on your computer. This simple step eliminates the possibility that your computer’s motherboard port is the actual problem.

Next, look for physical signs if you have an older desktop with a mechanical hard drive. These older drives use spinning platters and a moving actuator arm to read data. If you hear a rhythmic clicking, grinding, or a loud whirring sound, stop what you are doing immediately. A clicking noise is often the “click of death,” which happens when the drive head cannot find its track and hits a physical limiter.

If your computer is still somewhat responsive, check your available space. A drive that is 99% full can cause massive system slowdowns because the operating system lacks the “breathing room” required to manage virtual memory and temporary swap files. Delete some large video files or empty your trash bin to see if performance stabilizes.

Checking Drive Health on Windows 10 and 11

Windows provides several built-in tools that can tell you if your SSD or HDD is struggling. You don’t need to download suspicious third-party “cleaner” software to get these answers. Most of the time, the information you need is already sitting in your system files.

Using the Command Prompt for File System Errors

The first thing I recommend is running a check on the file system integrity. This won’t fix a physically broken motor, but it can fix errors caused by improper shutdowns or power surges.

1. Type cmd into your Start menu search bar.
2. Right-click “Command Prompt” and select “Run as Administrator.”
3. Type chkdsk c: /f and press Enter. (Replace c: with the letter of the drive you want to check if it isn’t your main boot drive).

Windows will likely tell you that it cannot run because the volume is in use, so it will ask to schedule the scan for the next time you restart. Type Y and then reboot your computer. This process can take anywhere from twenty minutes to several hours depending on the size of your drive and how many errors exist.

Reading SMART Data via PowerShell

Every modern drive has a built-in monitoring system called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology). While Windows doesn’t give you a pretty graph of this data by default, you can pull the basic status using PowerShell.

1. Right-click the Start button and select “Windows Terminal (Admin)” or “PowerShell (Admin).”
2. Type Get-StorageReliabilityCounter and hit Enter.
3. Look at the output for any non-zero values in error categories.

If you see a high number of “Read Errors” or “Write Errors,” your drive is actively failing. A healthy NVMe SSD should show very few errors even after three years of heavy use. If those numbers are climbing every week, your data is on borrowed time.

Checking the Event Viewer

If your computer has been crashing with Blue Screens of Death (BSOD), the Windows Event Viewer holds the evidence. This tool logs every significant event that happens in the background of your OS.

1. Press Windows Key + R, type eventvwr.msc, and press Enter.
2. Expand “Windows Logs” on the left and click “System.”
3. Look for “Warning” or “Error” entries with a Source labeled “Disk” or “ntfs.”

If you see repeated errors stating “The device, \Device\Harddisk0\DR0, has a bad block,” that is a definitive sign of hardware failure. A bad block means the physical surface of the disk (or a specific cell in an SSD) can no longer hold data reliably.

Checking Drive Health on macOS

Apple makes things a bit different, especially if you are using a newer MacBook Pro or iMac with soldered flash storage. On these machines, you cannot simply “swap out” the drive like you could on an older Dell XPS 13, so knowing the status is vital.

Using Disk Utility

The primary tool for Mac users is Disk Utility, which is located in your Applications > Utilities folder. This is the best place to start if you are seeing “disk not ejected properly” errors or if certain files won’t open.

1. Open Disk Utility.
2. Select your internal drive (usually named “Macintosh HD”) from the sidebar.
3. Click the “First Aid” button at the top of the window.

Disk Utility will attempt to repair the directory structure and the partition map. If First Aid reports that it cannot repair the volume, you are likely looking at a hardware failure. This is common on older MacBooks that have reached several thousand battery cycles and significant years of uptime.

Checking System Information for Hardware Details

If you want to see more technical details about your storage, you can dive deeper into the macOS system reports. This won’t give you a “health percentage” as easily as some Windows tools, but it provides context.

1. Hold the Option key on your keyboard and click the Apple icon in the top-left corner.
2. Select “System Information.”
3. Under the “Hardware” section on the left, click “Storage.”

Here you can see the exact model of your drive and its capacity. While macOS doesn’t show raw SMART data in this specific menu, it is a good place to verify if the system even recognizes the hardware correctly. If the drive doesn’t show up here at all, the controller on the SSD may have died entirely.

The Differences Between SSD and HDD Failure

It is important to understand that an SSD (Solid State Drive) fails differently than a traditional HDD (Hard Disk Drive). Because they use different technologies, your symptoms will vary significantly based on what is inside your machine.

Mechanical Hard Drive Symptoms (HDD)

If you own a desktop or an older laptop with a spinning disk, you are dealing with moving parts. These parts are subject to physical wear and tear from friction and heat.

• The Clicking Sound: As mentioned before, this is the most obvious sign of mechanical failure.
• Slow File Access: You click a folder, and the computer hangs for ten seconds before showing anything.
• Disappearing Files: A file was there yesterday, but today it says “File not found” or “Input/Output error.”
• Boot Loops: The computer starts to load Windows or macOS, then suddenly restarts because it can’t read a critical system file.

Solid State Drive Symptoms (SSD)

SSDs have no moving parts, so they are silent. They don’t click or grind, which makes them harder to diagnose through sound alone. Instead, SSD failure is often related to the “wear” of the NAND flash cells.

• Read-Only Mode: Some SSD controllers are designed to lock the drive into a “read-only” state when they detect imminent failure. This allows you to copy your files off one last time, but you cannot save anything new.
• Sudden Power Loss: The computer turns off instantly without a shutdown sequence, as if someone pulled the plug.
• Extreme Slowness in Apps: Large applications like Adobe Premiere or Photoshop may hang indefinitely while trying to access the page file on the drive.
• Corruption: Files become “garbled” or won’t open because the data stored in the flash cells has degraded.

When to Stop and Bring It In

There is a fine line between troubleshooting and destroying your data. If you realize your drive is failing, your instinct might be to keep running tests to “be sure.” This is actually the worst thing you can do.

Every time you run a heavy scan like chkdsk or a long Disk Utility First Aid, you are putting stress on a dying component. If the drive is physically failing, that extra stress could be the final straw that prevents it from spinning up one last time.

You should stop immediately and bring your device to a professional if you experience any of these “red alert” scenarios:

1. You hear loud, repetitive clicking or scraping sounds coming from the chassis.
2. Your computer stays on a black screen with no text at all, even after you’ve checked the power source.
3. You get a “No Bootable Device Found” error immediately upon turning the machine on.
4. The drive has become extremely hot to the touch during normal operation.
5. You have critical data (like wedding photos or tax documents) that is not backed up anywhere else.

If you are in the Centerville, OH area, we can help you navigate this. We see these situations every day at our shop on N. Main Street. We have specialized hardware tools designed to interface with failing drives more gently than a standard Windows or macOS environment would.

Our goal is not just to fix the computer, but to prioritize your data recovery first. If the drive can be saved, we will migrate your files to a new, high-speed NVMe SSD so your machine feels faster than it did when you first bought it. We typically provide a clear diagnostic report within 1-3 business days so you know exactly what happened and how much it will cost to fix.

If you aren’t sure if your drive is dying, bring it by 264 N. Main Street, Suite C. We offer free diagnostics to determine if your issue is a simple software bug or a hardware emergency. You can reach us at (937) 660-4819 if you want to check our current turnaround times.