My backup drive failed silently for 6 months before I noticed

Last Tuesday I went to grab an old project file from my external drive and the folder was just empty. Turns out the drive had been throwing read errors since March but Windows kept showing it as healthy in the properties menu. I only caught it because I ran a SMART check after a friend in my IT dept told me about CrystalDiskInfo. The drive was at 94% health with 2000+ bad sectors and I had zero warning. Now I run that check on every drive I own at the start of each month and I also moved my important stuff to a NAS with automatic versioning. Has anyone else had a drive die quietly like this without any popup or warning sign? What do you guys use to monitor your drives before they fail?

1 comments

1 Comment

thomas_johnson353d ago

Honestly, maybe the drive didn't fail quietly, you just weren't listening. Windows saying "healthy" means almost nothing, but that's on you for trusting it instead of checking SMART way earlier. Ngl, I never check my drives either, but I also don't expect a popup to babysit me every time a sector goes bad.