100 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2020HERE’S HOW CHECK YOUR HARD DRIVE’S HEALTH
Either its end is near, or it’s going to start
malfunctioning soon.
Even if you don’t hear a funny noise, your
drive can cause odd things such as frequent
crashes, a high number or error messages,
folder or filenames that have odd characters in
them, very sluggish performance, or
documents suddenly filled with garbage.
Most of these issues are a pretty clear sign
your drives are about to end, but not always.
First, check to see if your storage device
drivers are up to date. This is a good basic
step for any component, and it may improve
your storage drive’s performance if you’reencountering issues.
If a driver update doesn’t help, run
Windows’ built-in ‘chkdsk’ (check disk)
command-line utility. For those looking to
take extra care, run it every few months, at the
start of each quarter, for example.
’Chkdsk’ runs only with elevated
privileges. To do this, search for command
prompt in the Windows 10 search box, and
then select Run As Administrator from the
options as pictured at right.
To just check the status of all your drives,
type chkdsk for a read-only status of your
drives. If you want it to fix problems you needHDD interiors almost resemble a high-tech record player.