Unlike with music, for hard disks I "monitor with my ears". When I hear a metallic "clank, clank" I know shit has hit the fan.
Kind of like when I park a car too

 

Samsung Magician

 

yes, if you have dog ears

 

No it doesn't. But it's true, most HDDs make that noise when break.
More like a forensic time of death than anything helpful lol

 

I agree with the idea of backups, and one should to OS drive backups frequently.
But doing daily full backups of other entire hard drives is not very practical.
It wears out the backup drive and requires too much management work (deleting old backups,etc).

RAID is great if you can, but I now simply mirror my drives using Free File Sync.
I really only mirror 3 drives (and various folders get individual mirroring jobs - my household spreadsheets and info & my "Documents" folder from Windows OS drive, my DAW projects folder, etc.
So there is a bit of redundancy there, but those things change very frequently, so it's worth it
(And i forgot to filter out those folders from the FULL drive mirrors )

After running it once to mirror a drive or folder, it will afterwards just update the mirrored drive or folder according to changes.
It is pretty easy to learn how to use.
Default setting except for the very important setting to Copy SYMLINKS as LINKS .
And it does copy symlinks as links and why i use it often when copying things I know contain symlinks (windows copy hangs).
I found a few things that there is no point in backing up.
Recycle bin is already filtered out, but you can look at the comparison and then add to the filter using right-click menu - so easy!
It may be long scrolling some cache folders to get to the parent folder, but you can just add it and then alter the path using a wildcard asterisk \*. You can also filter out file types using wildcards "*.tmp", etc

I made batch jobs of individual drive / folder backups and have them run using Task Scheduler.

 

I prefer to use killdisk and write zeros to drive that is a good option if you want to backup the whole disk

 

I just downloaded this and i have no idea what im looking at. it just says "good" on all my drives. is there something else i can track? whats the point?

 

• HDD models that got excellent reviews for longevity
• Multiple backups = USB sticks as well
• Do NOT use SDDs for backup as they lose data if not powered/not in PC!

One tool that 1000% works for me and for most of everybody on the net - I researched this and everybody is swearing on this, look it up on Reddit, opinions - that you buy the SLOWER versions of HDDs that get amazing reviews for LONGEVITY. So in 2015-ish they had a super fast HDD and marked it with a purple or red color and it was expensive and I was POOR like a temple mouse. So I bought the SLOWED DOWN blue version, 1TB, then and because it is SLOWER it did not get used up fast at all and served me supremely well. Now everybody is telling you need this, because it is an excellent product: so I bought it
Western Digital 4TB 5400rpm SATA-600 256MB Red Plus WD40EFPX

then dump all your projects onto this. I occasionally back up everything onto this one, then put it back in the box: it is NOT living in my PC as I use the top Samsung SSDs.
Keep HDDs in your room, in a box, so they are always at room temperature. Keep multiple old HDDs and also buy USB sticks and save everything to the USB sticks as well.

 

If you see errors like the one in the picture, it's time to back up your data and buy a new hard drive.
You can also check how long your hard drive has been running.

 

Some SMART monitoring tool. I use GSmartControl (SmartCtl GUI), but HWInfo can help, too.
When you see some red flags going on, it's time to copy your precious data somewhere else. The worst is when you get a lot of "reallocation sectors" and "uncorrectable sectors", that's a big red flag.

Defragment hard drives so they don't have to work that hard. Trim SSDs once a week, depending on how much data you write/erase.

I've got about 20 hard disks of various sizes (mostly 500GB,1TB,2TB), and all are still working. Some are ~15-20yo! Yes, don't buy the fastest and biggest hard drives, slower and smaller HDs last longer purely for mechanical, physical reasons (1 platter/2heads, 2/4 at most, 5400-5900 rpm, 2.5" HDs last longer), that is if not used 24/7 but once a week or so. I have them for backup and "refresh" them every few years.

 

Last edited: Jan 22, 2026 at 12:51 PM

Use the System File Checker tool to repair missing or corrupted system files
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...em-files-79aa86cb-ca52-166a-92a3-966e85d4094e

CHKDSK (short for "Check Disk") is a Windows utility designed to find and repair system errors. It checks whether a file's size, location, and other system information match the data actually on the hard drive. CHKDSK also looks for parts of the hard drive that might corrupt your data.

chkdsk /f eliminates structural problems with the file system and the directory, correcting inconsistencies between the two.

How to run chkdsk /f to fix drive