Hi everyone, I hope I’m using the correct language. Our personal computer consistently keeps crashing and brings up a blue screen that says it’s fixing the problem but it does for about 10 mins and then another blue screen so I think we need a new “hard drive”? I’ve tried searching for the best one but I can’t see anything after 2017 on the Choice. So can anyone tell me what they think is a great one? Thanks
3 Likes
Maybe not a fatal disk problem that can’t be fixed. But not a good sign.
I would guess you have Windows, and whilst running it finds an error accessing a key file. On booting up to try and recover it finds a corrupted file.
Gives a blue screen to say it is doing a scan to see if it can fix the problem.
Decides it cannot and gives another blue screen asking you what action should be taken.
Boot into safe mode to do a full disk scan perhaps?
Disks and file systems are designed to handle ‘bad sectors’ but the file(s) affected need to be recovered.
Now, having said that, system disks these days, where the operating system lives, are not actually disk drives. They are solid state devices that emulate disks of the olden days. They are not generally retail things.
Disks these days are external devices that store huge amounts of data and connect via network or ports like USB.
5 Likes
Maybe and maybe not. Most (many) PCs will report a failing HDD at boot. It is more likely a corrupted file Windows is unable to fix.
Have you tried opening a CMD prompt (admin mode) and running ‘SFC /SCANNOW’ to see how that goes? It might crash; it might be able to correct itIYou can also boot off an external drive and run it from another HDD, or if you have a (Windows system) backup from before the crashes started you can reload that.
My guess is strongly toward a corrupted file not a failing HDD although the bad file could be resultant from the HDD.
As for a new HDD, Seagate/western digital ‘own the market’.
If you find you need to replace it especially if your PC has an M.2 slot (or even if not) an SSD is worth considering. BTW, SSDs are ‘retail things’ these days just as HDDs became ‘retail things’ when they replaced floppy disks decades ago.
6 Likes
Samsung are currently seen as best in the stable for SSDs and M.2 type devices.
For @Mare60 is the following advice that may prove helpful:
They might need to procure a USB stick or DVD with the Windows installation files installed on it. Run the setup until they see the ready to install choice and on the bottom left should be a choice to troubleshoot/repair Windows. They want to choose this and then there will be some other options from which they should choose troubleshoot and then command prompt. Once at the command prompt chkdsk c: /f should be then run on the windows drive. This is usually C drive, they may have to check if it is C (use dir c: and then if not c: replace with ascending letters of the alphabet until the right one is found) but it will be the drive with a Windows directory and a User directory. If the drive is a rotating drive not a SSD or M.2 they can change the chkdsk line to Chkdsk c: /r (replacing c: with whatever drive letter is needed). This r switch will take substantially longer than using the f switch.
After running they should try rebooting to see if the problem has been addressed. If they can now successfully get into Windows they should run in Command prompt/Powershell/Windows terminal (Administrator mode) the following command dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth and after this finishes they should run sfc /scannow at least once but until it says there are no errors found. This should fix any underlying corrupt Windows system files. Updating any sound and video drivers may also be helpful if the BSOD (Blue Sreen Of Death) is being caused by any of those two driver issues.
4 Likes
Another recovery option is to try an upgrade install of WIndows if the installation media in hand will allow it. It would overwrite everything windows and save all the apps, configuration detail, and user data
I have the Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB, reputedly good for 600TB of writing. The Samsung Magician App advises on its health. With typical PC use they should go about 10 years, and the ‘Pro’ versions longer. More reliable than a HDD and longer than most PCs last in a practical sense.
The M.2 NVMe is the best highest performing variety if the motherboard supports it, but they come in form factors from the M.2 blade through to SATA style units that are plug replacements for HDD. Seagate/Western Digital provide initialisation and migration software so they are easy to introduce into a system.
5 Likes
Thanks to everyone when response to my question. With all of your help I think we’ve finally got it sorted. 
5 Likes
Nooooooo. Don’t leave us wondering. Please share your findings.
2 Likes
I’m so sorry to have kept some of you waiting to hear my results. Sadly even though we tried most of the suggestions nothing worked. So, we’ve resorted to buying a new laptop. I can’t thank you all enough for all of your wonderful help.
4 Likes
I’ve found HDDs extremely reliable - I’ve got one still running in a computer that’s about 10 years old. I had a fleet of them at work with 55 computers I handled, ½ dozen more which were cloned ready to drop into a computer if there were issues. I only had one failure in 10+ years (which I suspect might have been manhandled).
Blue screen - was usually a WINDOWS problem. [or occasionally bad memory - but that was rare] I had it on my DELL here a few times up to a year ago, so did a Clean Install of Windows and it’s been better than it was new.
Don’t replace the HDD without checking it out properly first.
But then - HDDs are fairly cheap now - you might be able to upgrade to an SSD for much better speed (though I’m not certain about whether they’ll last as well in the long run).
1 Like
After an upgrade of a basic 10 year old Ivy Bridge laptop from a spinning disc 2.5” Sata II HDD to a Samsung EVO SSD the difference in performance was remarkable. Boot times went from minute/s to seconds. One can pay a little more for the Pro versions with a greater wear life, if heavy use is a concern.
4 Likes
Thing to remember about SSDs is that you should not pack them full of data. Most have spare data capacity built in to allow for cells that fail over time (provisioning). Most solid state drive production companies eg Crucial and Samsung, over provision these days. The easy rule is leave 25% spare but for most modern ones 10% is still probably a very safe figure. Even rotational drives benefit from some spare capacity. For rotational drives around 25% is again a safe figure, the operating system still warns when they get too close to capacity.
Leaving 25% on an SSD/M.2 will mean they last quite a long time (10 years is easily not outside those bounds), leaving more space increases that longevity. Based on the decreasing prices, speed and no need to defragment (in fact they should not be as this increases the writes without any benefit of speed of access), a SSD/M.2 is the increasingly obvious choice for the operating system drive. If you need to store large amounts of data without a need for the speediest reads then a rotational drive is a cheap way to do so, I don’t recommend them these days for the operating system drive or where speedy reads are required.
Samsung and many others state the expected life of NVMe/M.2 and SSDs in TBW (Terabytes Written), this is an expectancy of the total number of bytes the drive can have written to it (this as a measure is including what provisioning is provided for the drive). Most operating systems these days understand the solid state drives and they run the needed optimisations as required. The most important one from a user’s perspective is TRIM. Almost invariably it is turned on but you can check from a powershell/command prompt/Windows Terminal in Windows by using the following to check:
fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify
If you get a result with 0 in it the TRIM function is enabled, if it has a 1 instead TRIM is off:
showing the “TRIM is on” result…
NTFS DisableDeleteNotify = 0 (Allows TRIM operations to be sent to the storage device)
ReFS DisableDeleteNotify = 0 (Allows TRIM operations to be sent to the storage device).
ReFS is a specialized File System not often used in household computers but you will still see the result from the query. In the very rare case TRIM is not enabled it can be turned on by issuing the following command from a command prompt in Administrator mode:
fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0
SSD/M.2 drives themselves have firmware that control wear levelling and how to locate and read data from the cells. Wear levelling is when data is written, that it isn’t to the same cell each time. It is written to different cells to ensure every cell as much as possible, is evenly written to over the life of the drive. A typical USB stick or SD cards do not have this level of sophistication and if the same data was written multiple times to the stick or SD card, they can quickly fail.
Why not rotational drives? Well they aren’t a dead product but there are some reasons to consider other choices before them for operating systems.
They have largely reached their access limitations regarding speed of access both for read and writes. There are a number of speed measurements but most typical HDDs max out at about 150 MBps. SSDs use the same SATA connectors which limits them to around 500 MBps read and write speeds which the SATA III protocol is capable of allowing (Strictly SATA III supports 6 Gbps communication or roughly 4.8 Gbps throughput (600 MBps)) External factors affect all these theoretical figures.
They don’t like being bumped/dropped even from small distances. The read/write heads float on a cushion of air only 0.07mm or less above the spinning platter. Solid state drives are very resistant to this type of movement damage unless the damage results in breaking the entire board apart
They have moving parts that can fail where SSD/M.2 have no moving parts. In a HDD there are the head step motors that move the read write head/heads over the spinning platter/platters. Then there is the platter motor that spins the platter (most home version HDDs spin at either 7200 RPM or 5400 RPM). Some faster drives are available and they usually are made to spin at speeds of 10000 RPM. The faster they spin the more data passes under the read write heads for any given time. There are however speed limitations for the speeds that a drive can be built to provide. 7200 RPM is usually seen as the typical cap on spin speeds.
NVMe drives are capable of very fast read and write speeds, the top Samsung NVMe has a read speed of up to 7000 MBps (7 GBps) and a write speed of up to 4950 MBps (4.95 GBps), typical NVMe drives are around 1500 to 2000 MBps read and 700 to 1500 MBps write. Non NVMe M.2 are slower but often still for reads they are up to around 800 MBps and writes of around 700 MBps.
Solid state drives are very frugal on use of power. This makes them a great choice for laptops/tablets and similar as they allow much greater battery use life per charge, this is not such a great concern for a desktop plugged into a power source but still they save some power demands even in those. If you are using renewable energy then using solid state drives can mean that you can reduce the power supply power size from what you would need with rotational drives and thus save a bit of your renewable energy for other uses. This saving (it is minimal but over a year adds up) comes from not having to run the spindle (platter) motor when they are idle. At idle they consume about 1.4 Watts and rises to about 4 Watts when actively running, a typical HDD uses between 5 and 6.8 Watts. If both are idle the difference can be around 3.6 Watts and over 24 hours this is 86 Watts difference and over a year 31 kW of energy if both on 24/7.
Solid state drives are usually very light, they don’t need such heavy surrounds as rotational drives do, they don’t have metal platters, they don’t have motors nor do they need the vibration reduction support built into rotational drives. This means that many PCs and other laptops etc can be made much lighter than if they had rotational drives in them, not a big concern for a desktop sitting in one place but it does impact the portability of mobile devices.
5 Likes
Thanks for the long dissertation on SSD drives. But the OP bought a new computer, and it will have one of those as standard. 
I suspect they couldn’t care less how it works, just that it does.
1 Like
Alan didn’t 
The topic is hard drives and the OP originally asked about “what they [posters to the forum] think is a great one”. Glad you enjoyed the info I posted. Hopefully it helps someone if they have to make a similar decision.
2 Likes
I did like your post.
I think it is a no brainer these days.
For the operating system disk, you need speed but not a lot of capacity. 1TB would be considerably more than enough.
If you want a lot of capacity for your data in the multiple TBs, then HDD’s are cheaper than SSDs and I would want that as a drive external to the PC.
1 Like
Does that include replacing the hard drive? I hate to think you spent hundreds of dollars on a new pc if it could have been fixed with a part costing less than $100.
I have a laptop that is about 2 years old and the hard drive (actually an SSD) failed. I probably could have argued with HP about ACL as it is out of their warranty but they would have taken weeks to fix the problem, and a new (bigger, faster) SSD was $50 at my local computer shop. About 10 minutes to install the new drive and then a couple of hours to reinstall windows and I was back up and running (using it to write this post).
1 Like
Hello and thank you for your concern. Yes we’ve bought everything new as advised by an IT special which is also,a,friend so didn’t making money out of us. Thanks again to everyone who responded for your help and support.
3 Likes
Hope the old PC has been responsibly recycled. Hopefully your friend offered to attempt to recover any content from the old PC before a secure wipe (or other actions) your old hard drive of all personal content?
Some of the community have considerable experience with IT and computing equipment. Which may explain the more technical suggestions on how to resolve your original problem.
General comment for the broader community,
Modern PC’s are more like a box of Lego than anything else around the home. Most are made up from a kit of 10 or more core modular components (bricks) that ‘clip’ together in a certain way to create a PC. When the PC stops working or plays up it is nearly always just one of these components that needs to be replaced, or repaired. Laptops are similar, but more limited in the availability of some of the replaceable components.
Personal preference is some of us will choose to replace a laptop or PC with new rather than pay for or attempt a repair. Some of us choose to continually repair and upgrade. It can be costly to pay a professional for the service. The quality of service providers varies. For those with the knowledge and free time to DIY it’s not so costly.
1 Like
