Troubleshoot Drive Reliability and Performance
In addition to symptoms that you can detect by observing system operation, most fixed disks have a self-diagnostic program called Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART).
- can alert the operating system if a failure is detected
- If you suspect that a drive is failing or if you experience performance issues such as extended read/write times
- try to run more advanced diagnostic tests on the drive
- Most fixed disk vendors supply utilities for testing drives, or there may be a system diagnostics program supplied with the computer system
- can also use Windows utilities to query SMART and run manual tests
- These tests can detect whether there is any damage to the device’s storage mechanisms
- In the case of performance, they can report statistics such as input/output operations per second (IOPS)
- If performance is reduced from the vendor’s baseline measurements under test conditions, it is likely that the device itself is faulty
- If performance metrics are similar to the device’s benchmark under test conditions, any slow read/write access observed during operation is likely to be due to a more complex system performance issue
- Possible causes include application load and general system resource issues, file fragmentation (on hard disks), and limited remaining capacity
- Extended read/write times can also occur because particular sectors (HDDs) or blocks (SSDs) fail
- Data loss/corruption means that files stored in these locations cannot be opened or simply disappear
- When bad sectors or blocks are detected, the disk firmware marks them as unavailable for use
- If there is file corruption on a hard disk and no backup, you can attempt to recover data from the device using a recovery utility