My Hard Disk Is Dying

Weird Things Happened

A few days ago, my computer suddenly started doing weird things like having random BSODs, extreme slow downs, freezing and hang-ups. Having these problems were very frustrating and annoying specially when I was doing or finishing a lot of work for a client.

I tried to troubleshoot what caused the problems using various internet tools and programs but I didn't get any good results. In the end, I decided to re-format my hard disk and re-install my Operating System.

After re-formatting my hard disk and re-installing my operating system, my computer was still experiencing some extreme slow downs.

Bad Sectors Found

When I troubleshot my computer for problems or errors before, I didn't perform a Check Disk (chkdsk) on my hard disk because the built-in S.M.A.R.T. indicator said it was still healthy. I guess my hard disk is still generally healthy because Check Disk only found 164 KB of bad sectors in my System Drive.

It was very stupid of me to not perform a Check Disk first before re-formatting hard disk and re-installing my operating system. If I had then I wouldn't had wasted a lot of time re-installing everything back. LOL!

My computer was slowing down drastically because it was reading files written on bad sectors of the hard disk. Check Disk fixed it by moving those files out of the bad sectors and marking these sectors as bad to make them unwritable anymore.

Bad Sectors = Dying Hard Disk

My hard disk is only 3 years old. Knowing that it already has bad sectors is very surprising for me because my 10 year old 40 GB Seagate hard disk hasn't had any yet and I'm still using it as an external hard disk for back-ups.

From what I've read in the internet, having bad sectors in a hard disk means that the hard disk is dying or it's about to fail. It's like a symptom and the only real solution is to replace it with a new one but I can't replace it right now because I'm dead broke.

I was expecting money from Bubblews.com but it's currently ignoring all my request for payment. If I was paid by Bubblews.com for my four redemptions then I would have had enough money to buy a new hard disk.

A New Hard Disk

My current hard disk is a 500GB Western Digital Caviar but, for my new hard disk, I was thinking of getting a 1 TB hard disk like the one below.

The hard disk in the picture above is a WD Blue 1 TB Desktop Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache - WD10EZEX. As you can see it's also from Western Digital and it's only $69.44 USD. It's not very expensive. If I had money right now then I would buy it without second thoughts.

Of course, I will still shop around for a better hard disk once I have enough money to buy a new one but if I can't find anything better that will fit my budget then I might have to get this one.