It may be hard to tell if signs of a failing hard drive appear because of normal wear and tear - but if you wait, it might be too late.

If your problems persist, your hard drive failure symptoms might be signaling real trouble. Or, check out our comprehensive guide to speeding up and cleaning up your PC to do a full inventory of what might be causing poor performance.ĭisk fragmentation happens on hard disk drives too, so if you have an HDD try running a defrag tool, which will help with junkware removal (it’s like cleaning your hard drive’s closet). Learn how to fix 100% disk usage in Windows to see if your symptoms clear up. Sluggishness, buggy apps, and other erratic behavior from your computer may not indicate your hard drive is failing. Here are the most common hard drive failure signs: Make sure you test your hard drive to locate the source of any problem. Failing hard drive signs can be merely annoying at first, but if left unaddressed they can quickly destroy your Windows or Mac computer. You’ll see “About this Mac” change to “System Information.Just as when you’re sick, symptoms of hard drive failure can seem small before becoming a full-blown problem.

Click the Apple icon in the upper-left corner (in the toolbar), then hold the Option key. The process to check your SSD health on your Mac is straightforward and takes about a minute.ġ. Check Your SSD Health Using SMART Status System Reports

This helps macOS keep track of the SMART status of all your drives by default, and there are several tools that read this status with varying levels of detail. Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) is an automated self-test system for SSDs and more traditional HDDs. You can predict and plan for both failure types in advance based on certain characteristic failure patterns. As such, it pays to keep an eye on the health of a drive that might fail without warning. When it reaches the limit, it will suffer total failure and no data recovery is possible. but the flash memory used in SSDs can only survive a certain number of write cycles. They still have the same high rates of early failure. On the other hand, SSDs show a different failure curve.

Macbook hard drive test