True. But at that point it would have been to late in all cases I had. First there was that noise, and seconds later the drive died on me. And that is what I would love to know: Would monitoring ever show something like that coming? I guess not, but that's just a wild guess. And 'Your SMART values are dropping!' while hearing the click of death - I don't need that. Thats like having a red-shirt lying on the ground and bones being like "he's dead Jim"

 

I once accidentally had two antivirus programs running simultaneously, which then destroyed my hard drive. Then I heard the click-clack sound! I was surprised that you could ruin your hard drive like that. That was a one-off incident—it never happened to me again.

I even had a cable fire in my PC once!!! The unconnected floppy disk drive had power, but the other connector touched metal, causing a short circuit, i.e., a cable fire, resulting in a burnt cable.

A vacuum cleaner also burst into flames; I unplugged it and put it out in the bathtub!

 

Last edited: Jan 24, 2026 at 5:56 PM

Which electrical appliances are common causes of fires?

One of the main causes of fires in offices is defective or improperly used electrical appliances. Devices that are constantly switched on or not properly maintained, such as computers, printers, or coffee machines, can overheat and ultimately cause fires. It is estimated that around 30% of office fires are due to electrical appliances.

How dangerous are improperly laid cables?

Another common cause of fires in offices is improperly laid or damaged cables. Cables laid under carpets or bent too sharply can easily be damaged. This damage can cause short circuits and thus lead to fires.

What role does human error play?

Human error is another common cause of fires. Whether it's forgetting to switch off electronic devices, smoking in the building, or improperly storing flammable materials, human error contributes significantly to the outbreak of fires

 

I specifically installed a bottom fan with 800 RPM for cooling, in addition to the two front fans with 800 RPM for sufficient cooling; in summer you should keep an eye on the temperatures and if it gets too hot, switch off the PC!

I asked Seagate what the ideal temperature should be for a hard drive, and the answer was 27 degrees!

I even once used a fan controller with four connectors to attach a fan directly under an HDD to get down to 27 degrees, which worked but the background noise was too loud.

Why do high temperatures damage your hard drive?

- Heat can cause lubricants to become too thin and evaporate into unwanted areas inside the drive.
At high temperatures, the density of the air decreases. This reduces the force exerted on the read/write head, causing it to move closer to the disk surface and increasing the risk of contact, or a "head crash."

- Greater heat means more electron movement. This increases the risk of a bit flipping, where a 1 becomes a 0 or vice versa.

 

Last edited: Jan 24, 2026 at 6:47 PM

Right. There was a time when I believed otherwise, I had a SCSI system 500 MB drive where I could fit OS and personal data (1995-96). Then I bought a removable Iomega Jaz 1G drive for backup.
Believe it or not, I had malfunctions on the sys drive and after replacing it I wanted to recover backup files and boom! Jaz drive died. Nothing recovered. Then I discovered that Jaz was not a reliable drive, even if not used much.

The only thing I noticed was that opening files (txt, whatever) took ages. Then armageddon within hours.

 

Every six weeks or so I stick it up my ass and let it marinate for 24 hours. Hasn't failed me so far.

 

Exactly, like I said just like when you park a car "by ear". Well, one clack is usually enough...

Damn, I know a lot of PC stuff but haven't tried that. With or without vaseline ?

 

Vaseline kills the bytes. I only use Crisco.

 

Then we both had our awakening call at the same time.
My akai libs desaster was with a zip scsi drive on an akai S2800.

The akai had a backup routine where it would copy one disk to another, but the target had to be formatted first if I remember correctly. So I formatted the backup disk and then stupid me was a little unfocused and copied the empty backup disk over the original, writing zeros over the whole zip.

I still remember the pain the moment I found out.
All my instruments gone of all my songs, I was in tears.
Today I'm glad it happened. I never lost data after that.

 

be sure to store on blue-ray everything that seems important for you on your hard drives. also.. invest in latest tech of hard drives not the older ones even if you dont play games a circut drive might be better than the older rotating ones.. ssd is better..

honestly i use hardware monitor.

 

i Use sata ssd's
i have an external dock that allows me to hardware clone drives. i can take my drive and put one of equal or greater size into my dock hit two buttons and in 5 minutes have a spittting image of my main drive. if i drop it into my computer the computer doesnt even knw the difff, recent file searches everything identical. i do this about once a week and then i dont monitor my ssd's health and life is a hell of a lot easier

the only effective method to protect your data is to back it up.

 

In general two disk external docks open a world of possibilities. I've been using one for ages, with two e-SATA connectors. It's the shit

 

Thanks so much for this. I liked it so much I bought the 5 license Family version. It's a lifetime license, so that worked out about a tenner for each one. It's a great program. I have a lot of hard disk testing stuff but this one passed me by. I really like the temps monitoring and the way it provides so much info in a very concise manner. It really brings something new to the table.

I found out today that Hard Disk Sentinel can actually repair a drive with problem sectors.

Reinitialise disk surface test, the hard disk status will be stable and the complete surface can be used without problems. Ideally, absolutely no reallocation required: the hard disk may return to PERFECT status and 100% health would be reported again:

https://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_case_weak_sectors.php

That is a very informative read that everyone should have a look at because it explains the difference between bad and weak clusters and lets you know what can be physically fixed and what can't. I'm so glad I found this program. I have one drive that is just slowly going to bits with both bad and weak sectors. But I'll get back to that a little later...

I also like that Hard Disk Sentinel has some good testing tools built in as well. I have been using GSmartControl for a lot of these and it's usually very reliable but the latest version of it stopped working on my box for some reason. Programs like Seatools you would think would be able to test a Seagate hard disk but they don't even recognize it. I just use the older Seatools for Dos. Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Diagnostics is another quick and easy program for doing short and extended tests. It's a bit hard to find the download for it but it is out there if you look. Not many programs have a conveyance test to check if a hard disk has been damaged in transit (hard disks have something like gravity sensors that can tell if they have been dropped) but GSmartControl is one of the very few that do.

Again, thank you for this. I had used it before but there was a recent update and it's definitely come a long way. I spent a few hours with it today going in depth and it's shocking what this program can do for free. I bought the donation version which gives you a portable install. I just paid 1 buck for it, but I'll donate more later. I used it to test a couple of whole hard drive copies I have recently made. They had a lot of symlinks on them and they were tricky. This program and this Copy SYMLINKS as LINKS feature is amazing! You can also get them to actually copy the data that the symlinks point to as well as copying them as links. So there's a couple of different options there depending on what you are trying to do. It's extremely flexible as well with error reporting. Too much to go in to here but I found about 3 or 4 different things this program can do and do so much better than any other software I have. And it's free. I'm going to be spending a bit more time with it and going a bit more in depth.

So that's two great programs I got added to my toolkit thanks to this thread. Invaluable.

I had a look for one of those drives. I found one for a 140 quid so I bought it. I was looking for something reliable to go in to my new rebuild of my windows 10 box. I have an 8TB and 4TB Seagate Firecuda to go in there as well as a few Samsung SSD's. You can never tell with drives though, even though it gets great reviews a few people still said the drive died on them. That's the thing with spinning rust on glass, it's easy to get unlucky, but with monitoring tools and good backup hygiene you should be able to mitigate the worst of it. Like someone said, having something backed up just once is no backup at all.

I use TeraByte Unlimited for my system drive imaging and cloning. It's quite inexpensive and absolutely solid (and fast).

https://www.terabyteunlimited.com/

And I use a few programs for actual file copying. Not sure if anyone has mentioned TeraCopy but it's free and is fast and thorough and easy to use. I probably use this more than any other. It integrates in to windows right click shell so you can select to use that instead of the windows copy if you like. It really is very fast and you can verify files after copy to make sure they aren't corrupted on the fly.

https://www.codesector.com/teracopy

I'm going to buy the Pro version of it in a bit. Another program I use a lot for other copying stuff is called Personal Backup. I use this for specific folder copying to specific drives as I already have the 'jobs' set up.

https://personal-backup.rathlev-home.de/index-e.html

That is also free. And it's very fast and clever, but it takes a little getting your head around because of its flexibility. It should be on the short list of ones to check out at least. I use these programs for different purposes. I use Personal Backup for quickly copying my Music Projects drive at an end of a session as I have 'jobs' or 'batch jobs' already set up to my specific drives. It's a great program and I probably could use it for other stuff, but that is what works for me.

I'm about to buy a program called Bvckup2 and many consider it the best, most fast, most easy, most powerful file copier going. It's not free - it's like 50 bucks, and I'm going to buy it for when I set up my NAS that I am building now.

https://bvckup2.com/

I've tried the demo of it and it really is blazingly fast and super easy. The fact you can use network drives as well for the 50 bucks price is just great. And it's not subscription. I don't do subs. I'm just waiting till I get my NAS set up a bit more before I buy it as I'm trying out a few different programs for different things as well. Bvckup2 also has options for dealing with Symlinks and that is why I think it's going to be my main program for robust file copying and integrity checking.

Another really good program is called AllSync4.

https://www.alldup.de/help4/allsync_description.php

On the face of it this program looks really easy to use but it's probably the most confusing out of all of them. There's a lot of power there but I didn't quite get it after a few hours of testing. I'm going to buy the basic version of it though because it does do one job very well and quick and easy and that is syncing two drives to check for differences, without actually committing to copying stuff. It's a handy feature. It will tell you what the differences are then what needs to be updated and what needs to be copied if it doesn't exist on the other drive. You double click on the info line and then give it a few minutes while it scans the drive again and gives you the info for stuff to be updated or stuff to be copied. This is for like a 1TB drive, so that is quite fast really. It's only about 20/30 bucks for the basic version and is well worth checking out. That feature alone is worth it for me to buy it but I can't see me using it for much else as I have other programs that are much easier to use for those kinds of jobs.

There is one program though that beats every other single syncing program for speed by a whole lot though, and it's called AllwaySync. They don't make it any more or rather it is called GoodSync now. I believe you can still get a free copy of the program though. I got a download for it from this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/10cjrto/allway_sync_acquired_by_goodsync/

You can find the link to the free program there. I think it's free. I have a free version of it. It might be that you need a key for that. It's not wares, it's legit - if you don't have the key then it won't work, but I think it still is free, just don't quote me.

The thing with AllwaySync is that it can compare and sync 2 hard disks in a matter of seconds, then you can change a file, and synch it again and it doesn't start the job from scratch - it remembers what it loaded. Most of these other programs you have to back to the start again all the time. I'm not sure what the trick is with AllwaySync, I imagine it's working on hashes of the files themselves, but all I know is, is that it is the fastest program in existence for this kind of thing. It can use filters and when you are ready to copy it will swap out the files you tell it to. It's probably my most essential program for this kind of stuff. GoodSync is a subscription model now and people say it's not as good. Another great program killed by the corporates...

Another really good and free program is called SyncBackFree -

https://www.2brightsparks.com/download-syncbackfree.html

There is a paid version of it as well, but the free version of this is really excellent - it even has file integrity checking. Check out the reviews of it. People really love this free program a lot.

And finally, one last program to check out, if all you want to do is copy stuff fast and for free, then you need to have a look at Synchredible.

https://www.ascompsoftware.com/en/products/synchredible

This program is free for non business use. It is very highly rated. Read these reviews on Slashdot -

https://slashdot.org/software/p/Synchredible/

I must admit I haven't got around to using it yet. Reason being I've been testing all these other programs and well, I actually copied 3 x 1TB hard disks using just TeraCopy. So I've just been using these 'synch' programs to double check integrity and make sure I haven't missed stuff. Of course the synch programs can copy as well but I didn't need that just now. And now would be a good time to say that if you are using these programs for copying, some of them are quite complex and it is very EASY to make a mistake that can wipe your data, so make sure you do a few dummy test runs with stuff backed up elsewhere before hand. It really is super EASY to mess it up.

Now back to repairing damaged sectors on a hard disk like the excellent Hard Disk Sentinel I talked about above there at the start of this post - there is one program I want to mention that I'm surprised no one else has yet, and it's called Stablebit Scanner.

https://stablebit.com/Scanner

It's like 20/30 bucks per machine and if there is one program you need and have to pay for then this is the one. You get a decent discount then for every copy you buy extra after your first one. It has a few uses. It's mainly a program for doing SMART reporting and temperature reporting and all that kind of stuff, though it doesn't do drive testing that much. But it does include a Burst test which you are supposed to run for 24 hours which really stresses not so much the drive but the connections around the drive involving throughput. Or something like that.

But what Stablebit Scanner really excels at is checking for bad and damaged sectors, and telling you exactly where those sectors are, and then if possible, repairing those damaged blocks. I know there are other programs that attempt this - Hdd Regenerator is one I think, apart from the aforementioned Hard Disk Sentinel. I've heard varying reports as to how effective Hdd Regenerator is. I think you can find that on Sergei Strelec's excellent WinPE boot disk so you can try it for yourself. I've never tried it. I just know that so far Stablebit Scanner has worked for me every time on the files I have needed it to work on: audio .wav renders so I haven't need to try anything else.

This is a scan of my bad drive:



It's from a couple of years back. The drive hasn't had much use. This one is more recent:



Each one of those sectors contains many bad blocks:



When you have recovered the data off the disk you can then write it back to the disk but really once you see this kind of thing on a disk it's best just to pull it and put in a clean one, even if you can fix these errors sometimes depending on what is wrong. Very often you are just playing whack a mole and going round in circles. I've now stopped using this disk because any more writing to it just messes stuff up further. What happens with reallocated sectors is that they get marked to be never used again if they are indeed bad (as opposed to weak - which can be fixed), and if possible the data gets moved to a good part of the disk, but if like me you have used up like 96 percent of the disk surface, there isn't a lot of room for shuffling things about. I maybe didn't explain that very well, but you might get the general picture.

Here is a screenshot of the recovery process:



The thing is one of those files that says PARTIALLY RECOVERED, was in fact fully recovered and usable. I checked it against a known good copy and I even installed it to test it. Perfect. Not sure why it says that, just some technical detail I don't understand. Anyway, I'm not aware of any other program that scans a disk for bad sectors and then tells you where they are and then attempts to recover them with a pretty good recovery rate. I would say it's recovered at least 80 percent of the files that have been corrupted. I went back and used this disk again, and of course the bad sectors got moved about and other errors popped up and I fixed them again> really I was just doing this for educational purposes as in no way was I writing to this disk any more with my serious music projects, and I already had it all backed up anyway, so it was just an experiment. I'm not saying there aren't other programs that can do this, but in all my hunting for hard disk programs I've not come across one. Please share if you do know of one.

All in all it depends what you want to do. But if you deal with a lot of samples and have a large library of your own work and projects, then you will need a lot of drives. Spinning rust on glass (conventional hard disks) are still king for many purposes. SSD's are better for other stuff, and NVMe drives are better for other stuff again. Each has strengths and weaknesses. Usually you will want a mixture of all of those for flexibility and for ease of use and for redundancy and peace of mind, and of course, price. The price of hard drives is volatile now but it's only going in one direction really: UP! The WD Red 4TB I bought yesterday was 140 quid. It was 100 quid pre Xmas time. But the prices are going up and down as new stock comes in. I paid 220 quid for 8TB Firecuda, but they are like 200 quid now. The place where storage has been hit hardest is SSD's - my 2TB Samsung QVO 870 that I bought for like 180 quid last year is now 350 quid! 4TB SSDs are going for close to 500 quid on Amazon. It's not just RAM that has been affected by the AI bubble/madness.

[Just a quick note to say that whatever conventional hard disk (spinning rust) you get, make sure it is CMR and not SMR. CMR is Conventional Magnetic Recording. This is how it should be done. Shingled Magnetic Recording is where the make up of the magnetic substrate of the drive is 'shingled' like diagonally like tiles on a roof, so you can fit more bits and bytes on to the same sized surface, thereby increasing the maximum amount of storage you could put on a certain sized disk or platter. The argument was that the hard disk manufacturers would then pass that saving on to customers which of course they never did. What is worse is that they then lied about what disks had SMR vs. CMR when people started to find out about it and realised it was an inferior technology. You really don't want an SMR drive. Maybe, just maybe if you are using it for archival purposes, but really, seeing as manufacturers charge the same price as CMR drives, you might as well get CMR.]

I wanted a 4TB SSD to put in my new computer, but there is no way I am spending close to 500 bucks for a Samsung. Of course, Crucial have dropped out of the market and that is one reason on top of AI that prices are so silly right now. NVMe are faster than SSD but also cheaper for the moment but that won't last long - they are getting more expensive every day as well. I don't need to tell anyone reading this thread.

I think what I'm going to do is put in a cheap 4TB SSD that you can pick up for about 200 bucks and just put say my Komplete Library or my BFD or SD libraries on it. Stuff that if the drive fails you can just download again or recover from a back up and write it to a new drive. [Coz as you know there's little to no warning when an SSD goes bad. It goes Kaput. Usually with no warning at all and nearly always with no chance of recovery.] Plus these don't need to be fast drives to write to - you are just reading from them. And they aren't going to get hammered coz once you have written the data it's just a case of reading it back off there once in a while. You get the benefit of having the fast read times of an SSD and it's not much more expensive than a spinning rust drive, but it is very noticeably faster for loading say Kontakt stuff.

If you think about it, it just doesn't make sense to put in a 450 quid Samsung SSD that really is built for the rigors of the reading and writing to and from an Operating System - that is really what you are paying for there. And it's just all that is needed here in this use case. It's time to get real. Having said that, these drives will still keep going up in price for a while now and they will just get less reliable as manufacturers rush them out the door and use cheaper quality components and test them less to bring them to market as quickly as possible. I bought a 4TB Crucial BX for 220 quid not long back, but it was faulty. Of course they didn't replace it at that price. They couldn't replace it at all - it was out of stock. If I wanted to buy a new one now it would be a hundred quid more expensive again - that is if I could even find one. They aren't great SSD's anyway but it would have been alright for reading from just for samples. There is no way I am paying over 300 quid for a crappy SSD like that now even if I did find one available. I'll buy an even crappier one and save myself a hundred bucks!

A little tip to anyone buying or building a new computer today: thankfully it will probably include an NVMe drive or two, but even if it doesn't, the same principles apply - you don't want your OS drive to be too big as you are going to be backing it up on a regular basis. I know that it only backs up the data on it and not the whole drive, but still those backups add up if like me you keep a backup of any changes you make so you can roll back if something messes up. And I make a lot of changes. So don't cheap out on an OS drive. Probably that will be on NVMe as well these days, but just for those situations where you maybe are refurbishing or rebuilding an old system. It might not even have NVMe slots. So get the best SSD you can afford (can't go wrong with Samsung) and obviously just large enough to realistically hold the programs you are putting on it. 512GB or 1TB should be more than enough for most people. And then what you do is you buy a cheaper SSD drive to offload a lot of the crap that you know gets written to the C: drive anyway by lazy programmers. But you will need to learn about symbolic linking. Hard Link Shell is your friend --

https://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html

It's very easy when you get the hang of it and it opens up a whole new world. The trouble is it can also open up a whole new world of hurt if you go mad with it without any methodology. You will soon get confused. Just as I have and that is why these programs I mentioned earlier with regard to Symbolic Linking are so important to me. Try scanning even a 1TB hard disk to find all the symbolic links. You can't copy them either, well, you can kind of... but if the links are broken because you moved something elsewhere... oohh boyeee are you in for some fun searching for that. Thankfully, Free File Sync will actually scan the drive in a few minutes and give you a list of every single symbolic link on there even nested in folders, and it will tell you whether the link is dead or not, and then you can decide to copy it or not depending on what you want to do.

But anyway, just use if carefully and logically and you will be fine. Reason (the DAW) for one, is a program that still insists on writing to the C: drive and you can NOT stop it. But it works fine if you just let it copy where it wants, then move those files to a cheaper SSD (coz you can easily replace that data) and just use a symbolic link to point to where the actual files are really stored. It's just a glorified shortcut at the end of the day.

The point it, that if you do this for a few programs you can save a lot of space. It means you can get a smaller OS drive or a better OS drive (or both) for the money you have, plus you have the benefit of having smaller sized backups for your C: drive. You only need to back your other ancillary drive up now and again as there is no important data on there that can't be quickly put back on. That is the idea anyway.

And if you take this approach not only will it save you money, it will save you time (in the long run). And hopefully make you better organised. Another side-effect is that you get to understand how your particular programs are structured and that can come in handy later when you are doing a little audio debugging when you get problems. I know that I have found it beneficial. I would rather have just been able to afford a bigger drive to start with, but it's worked out ok. Now that I have money for bigger drives I still use the same system I have, because it makes sense. When you learn the hard way, you are loathe to throw that knowledge away.

A little tip if you do this: make sure whenever you install a program to let it install to its default location, then move it and link it. Sure, some programs allow you to set a data folder on install, and some of those programs even work, but it's surprising in this day and age how lazy (or incompetent) many programmers are when it comes to file management. They might be DSP geniuses, but you should see the state of their bedroom!

If all goes well, then you can use this knowledge for when you do get a system with NVMe drives - it is the same principle exactly. But you do need to be organised and methodical. From there you will then know how to expand on this concept and use it in other areas where it comes in handy nearly every day when you are installing new software.

Ok, wrapping up... and back to talking about the software...

As for writing all this stuff about the different programs, I just mention this about the hard drives because if you are spending hundreds and hundreds of pounds on hard drives, it makes sense to spend a few tens of pounds on programs to diagnose them and fix them and back them up, then check and verify them. And that is why I did a bit of a deep dive here on a lot of the programs available. Every program I mentioned here is worth checking out. There are many more out there - dozens and dozens - but hopefully this narrows it down a bit for those looking for a solution. No one program does it all, they all have strengths and weaknesses, some just do one thing and do it very well, other programs do most of what you would expect but have one major thing missing. It depends on your use case and only you know what you want/need.

The prices of hard drives will come down eventually but we are looking at least another year or two of these crazy prices. So it makes sense to have programs that we know how to use to get the most and the best out of our drives, and to be able to fix or at least recover stuff off drives we might want to have replaced but maybe didn't have the money to. That's why I took the time to write this very long post, and an opportunity to share something back as a thank you to the people who helped me expand my knowledge.

No matter how much you think you know, there is always something new to be learned... and a program out there somewhere that you never even heard of, that does something that you never even knew was possible...

 

On last thing from my side, because we started to talk about backup media in general: Please keep 2 things in mind: Recordable Blurays have 2 flaws: First the data itself is stored in an organic film by destroying (burning) parts of that film. And second the disk itself consists of two layers that could get loose over time (but not as bad as with DVDs). Manufacturers try to emulate aging with different methods to get an approximation of data safety, but no one really knows when exactly the organic film is gonna destruct itself.
As backup medias are not read often, it could be too late atm you need to restore data.
Now about SSD: There is a huge misconception of what these are. These are not 'solid', I mean the bits are not 'solid'. Solid just means 'no mechanically spinning parts'. Problem with SSDs: They need to be powered (often, for longer periods) to update their written data. The bits are not stored to a magnetic media, it's more like trapped magnetism in a circuit. That magnetism degrades without power. That is why a powered up SSD always refreshes it's data. The data is safe as long as the controller does not die and the data is refreshed periodically. To me, an SSD is the worst option for long time storage. Plus: In a worst case with a spinning harddrive, a data rescue center WILL get your data back (maybe not after a fire, but even then). It is just a question of money. If money is no issue, you could even get an electron microscope to read the data directly from the platters.
I'm not sure about SSD, my guess is the data could be vanished for good.
So I'm team Sata Dock for spinny 3,5" drives.

 

I have two external 2TB Samsung SSDs for backup! I've read that it's sufficient to charge the external SSDs once or twice a year. Storage on an SSD is called "electrical storage." I think most reports about storage media are simply copied from others. The truth is hard to find.

Regarding Blu-rays, I've read that some libraries, according to a fixed schedule, recopy all their existing Blu-rays every 5-15 years, meaning they burn new copies. You know how it works in museums and libraries; temperature and humidity are particularly important for the preservation of cultural treasures.

Harmful UV radiation is also heavily mitigated there, either through film on the windows or high-quality UV-blocking glass.
I bought the Verbatim brand; it's supposed to be good quality, but as a private individual, I can't verify that.

Almost all of my Blu-rays have reliably backed up my data so far. The failure rate for my CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays is approximately 3 out of a thousand defective. With CDs and DVDs, it's usually scratches that are visible with a magnifying glass!

 

Last edited: Jan 27, 2026 at 2:37 PM