Why Time Machine? Because when you replace your hard drive, as you will have to do, you can restore your data quickly from the Time Machine backup. If you think your boot disk is about to fail, you should use Time Machine to back it up to an external drive immediately. If you haven’t already done so, do it now. It could be a sign of imminent failure.īackup your data! Yes, I know we’ve already said that but it’s very important. If you can see files but can’t open them, or if their icons disappear, or the names have changed, something has gone wrong in the disk’s file directory. If files disappear, or it takes longer than it should to open a folder, then your drive may be in trouble.įiles are corrupt. If you hear anything other than a quiet, smooth whirring coming from a drive, it’s probably about to fail. It’s usually quite loud and could be a clicking sound or a loud whirring, or both. Your Mac or external drive is making a strange noise. There are more possible symptoms of a failing hard drive. How to tell if your Mac’s hard drive is failing? This software is also notarized by Apple. Meanwhile, download the free version of CleanMyMac X here. We’ll explain how to use it later in the article. They won’t prevent a physical failure of the drive, but they could repair your damage disk permissions. A hard drive that was fine one day could fail completely the next.ĭid you know? MacPaw’s CleanMyMac X has a number of maintenance tools that can keep your drive running smoothly. Or it could be that there was a fault in the mechanism all along and it’s only just shown up. It could be the age of the drive itself that causes the heads to become worn or the disk to fail to spin properly. There are any number of things that can cause a hard drive to fail. You can use Time Machine, third party backup software, or an online backup service, it doesn’t matter. Please set up a regular backup schedule now. It’s too late once your disk has failed, and the data is lost. Tip: Before we start, do you backup your Mac regularly? Please do.

Mac is unable to load past the Apple logo screen. In this article, we’ll tell you how to detect disk failure on your Mac and what to do about it. But there are still plenty of new Macs sold with hard drives, and many of us also use external hard drives to store data. Thankfully, now that most Macs come with an SSD rather than a physical hard drive, it’s less common. There are few things more frightening when using a computer than the sound of a disk failing or the realization that it has already failed and your data is lost.

Late 2012 mac mini replace hard disk