Hard Drives

I recently worked on a laptop that had a hard drive problem. It’s not always easy to diagnose a hard drive issue, as sometimes it works, or partly works, then stops. In this case Windows started to the sign-in screen, but was really slow, and after signing in, it just kept signing in. That circle kept spinning and spinning. I’ve seen this sort of thing on Macs too.

There are a number of things you can try to fix an issue like this. If it’s a corrupt Windows problem, then Windows has a recovery option to fix that, and this computer eventually tried to go into that, but failed actually opening that up. I tried a Windows disk also, to no avail, which is why I then tried another hard drive. Since it worked fine from that, I knew the hard drive had failed, and was unable to be written to.

While it seems like that’s the death of a computer, a hard drive is not usually difficult to replace. Unfortunately, the old hard drive was unreadable so the data couldn’t be retrieved from it, but this person had a backup, so that was excellent. I replaced the drive and loaded Windows and the computer is back in business.

In this case, I had a used 250Gb SSD drive, which makes it a peppier computer. I’ve suggested replacing your older mechanical drive with a Solid State Drive before. It can add a few more years to the lifespan of your computer. I like the Samsung EVO drives, you can look at one of those by clicking on the link below.

Samsung 860 EVO 500GB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E500B/AM)

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​At $73, the 500Gb drive is now priced at what the 250Gb was just a year ago, so I highly recommend it, though the 250Gb is $20 cheaper. This is true for older MacBooks as well as PC laptops, so if you feel like keeping that computer going a little longer, consider upgrading the hard drive.