My HP Elitebook 840 G2 is constantly using all its hard drive space even though it's not supposed to be full.
My HP Elitebook 840 G2 is constantly using all its hard drive space even though it's not supposed to be full.
Do you have any suggestions for tools that can verify how good a hard drive is, see its health status, or help evaluate it?
Are there any telltale signs that your hard drive is going wrong?
Two: My hard disk doesn't show up on the computer's startup menu because it looks like it isn't connected at all. <- Getting a hard drive to actually die is really rare, but I had one fail less than 30 days after buying it. I sent them back through RMA and they said it was a manufacturing fault that caused my SSD to break down. If an SSD has reached its full capacity for TBW (TeraBytes Written), you can't write any more data onto it. Instead, the drive stays read-only and you still have access to all your files on it (it's similar to how CD/DVD/Blu-Ray discs work—you can read them but you cannot write anything new). I've been using SSDs since Q3 2015, and when I exclude that one exception which did fail, i haven't had any of my drives die or have their TBW filled. I've used/used SSDs from Kingston, Crucial and Samsung. But if you keep regular, updated backups (which you should), SSD failure wouldn't be a big deal for you. It would just mean taking the dead drive out, putting in a new one, and copying your stuff off that backup.
My M.2 NVMe SSD died right away. When I turned on the PC and started the operating system normally, everything worked fine until I logged into Windows. Then I went AFK for about two minutes to relax while making some tea. Suddenly, my computer restarted and the screen showed the Win log-in page again. Once I logged back in, things were weird. Some of the icons looked off and strange. It turned out that my PC had rebooted from my old OS drive instead of using my new NVMe SSD as the primary boot drive. That old drive was still sitting in the system but set up as a second boot option just in case the main one failed. Sure enough, I checked to see if my main operating system drive had disappeared; it wasn't anywhere. It didn't show up in my Windows Explorer either, and when I tried to check in BIOS settings, there was no mention of that drive at all. Finally, I had to send the drive back for repairs and got a brand new one sent to me as free shipping.
I had my card after its three-year guarantee ended. It was already old when I found out about that. But I still got a brand new one instead of giving up. Four and a half years later, it's working just fine.