Hard drives are pretty hard to kill for the most part as long as they are well ventilated. I have over five TB of storage, haven?t had a drive die in over two years. Each drive has its own cooling unit (a cheapo quiet fan caddy thing).
Usually when a drive starts to really die you?ll audibly hear it start clicking, or otherwise making a horrible screeching kind of sound. These kinds of crashes are almost always unrecoverable by normal means so get the data off of it asap if it starts making noise.
If data starts becoming unreadable, or you start getting random CRC errors when trying to copy files from HD to HD, you have a sector problem and sectors are usually recoverable with cheap software solutions. I still fix computers on the side and you wouldn?t believe the idiots here do to their failing hard drives lmao? They smash them against the desk, drop them from 5-6 feet in the air, freeze them (though this has been known to occasionally work LOL). *sighs*
As I tell them after their drive fails, if the data is important to you, you?ll either (A) ? hope to god that it?s a circuit board problem and get an identical circuit board from another hard drive and replace yours with it, or (B) ? Prepare to spend godly amounts of money for your data back from a clean room recovery station.
It?s funny to me that so many disasters could be avoided with a simple occasional backup from a large external drive. Funny enough? I don?t have any external drives
I suck at preparedness.