How To Test A Laptop's Hard Drive Health

There are times when you need to test  a laptop hard drive's health. After making the hard drive go full throttle for so long, it may start showing wear and tear. A laptop's hard drive is designed to run according to its manufacturer's specifications. There are several factors that determine a hard drive's health such as speed, drive size, bad blocks, seek time, error rates and so on. These factors are measured  by SMART or System Monitoring Analysis or Reporting Technology. And you can also use available  software utilities to access the laptop's smart data to regularly report the laptop's status and to allow you of imminent danger. Here is how to test a laptop's hard drive's health.

Install Diagnostic Utility

First  install Knoppix  (a highly recommended diagnostic utility on your hard disk). Start the utility, and  follow the instructions for running the test and save the results. Each test should compare the test results as against the manufacturer's specifications and indicate whether the results are within normal range or there is cause to worry. Let's say the test detects bad disk blocks or unusable sectors Knoppix marks the SMART data to prevent programs writing to the data.

Go Over Results
Go over the results again.  The report has a numeric rating ranging from 1 (low) to 253(high).  If the rating is high, the hard disk is in good shape. But if it's low, the disk needs help.  Keep note of ratings that are far out of range and pay special attention to ratings indicating imminent danger such as high temperature, high error rates, and large percentage of bad disk blocks. If the out of range indications are too many, it's time to back up the data and fix the hard disk.

Well. that's a wrap for "How To Test A Laptop's Hard Drive Health." This tutorial was short and sweet but shouldn't be too difficult to handle. 

Till then take care

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