The three certainties in a computer user’s life are death, taxes, and at least one broken hard drive. Unless you’re on the cutting edge of technology and have a solid state drive (SSD), the hard drive you’re currently relying on to store all of your precious data will eventually break. This is not a question of if but when. Mechanical hard disk drives, as opposed to SSDs, contain several moving parts that will inevitably wear out. The data on hard drives are stored on magnetic disks known as platters. These platters rotate at very high rates of speed on a spindle motor. This spindle motor relies on ball bearings to minimize the amount of friction and energy required to spin the platters. Over time these bearings will begin to wear and eventually fail. A failed ball bearing could very easily lead to a ruined spindle motor and consequently a useless drive. A bearing that is in the process of failing will sometimes cause your hard drive to make a grinding or buzzing noise.

If your hard drive starts making unusual noises, it could already be too late to save your data. However, let’s assume that you still have a few hours of useful life left in your drive. The first thing you should do is immediately shut down your computer. In this situation you want to minimize the amount of additional wear and tear that you’re putting on your drive. Next, you’ll need to make a couple of purchases. You will definitely need a new hard drive and could possibly need an external hard drive enclosure or SATA hard drive dock. Whether or not you need one of these two devices depends on your situation. If your ailing drive is in the desktop computer, then you can probably perform an emergency data backup by connecting the old drive and the new drive directly to your desktop’s motherboard. However, if you’re using a laptop or don’t feel comfortable opening up your desktop, then putting your new drive in an enclosure or an HDD dock will make transferring your data fairly simple. All you have to do is put the new drive in the enclosure or dock, attach the device to your computer, and backup all your files off the old hard drive.