(Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) attributes. Attributes Out of Rangeįinally, one of the best metrics you can look at regarding the health of your drive are the S.M.A.R.T. You can’t avoid bad sectors entirely, but if they increase in number, you should be concerned. Logical bad sectors are software-based, where your operating system determines that a particular hard drive sector is not behaving as expected. Physical bad sectors are caused by actual physical damage to the hard drive. An Increasing Number of Bad Sectorsīad sectors come in two forms, physical and logical. If you’re saving files only to find them corrupt when you open them next, it’s time to investigate. Except for instances like your computer crashing during a file save because of a power outage (without a UPS to keep it on), you shouldn’t be experiencing file corruption or missing files. Saving and accessing files on your computer should be a smooth and reliable process. While you’re at it, be sure to take some basic steps to increase performance so you can rule out other issues beyond disk problems. It’s a bit daunting setting this up because I don’t want there to be any problems if I ever actually need to do the restore.If your computer is acting sluggish in a way that can’t be explained by aging hardware, overly full storage, viruses, or excessive apps running, it’s worth looking at both your primary hard drive (the one your operating system is running off) and at any secondary drives you’re using for games or apps. Is that the case? Or is it fine as long as a WD drive is connected and somewhere ‘in the loop?’ Seems crazy if not. I read somewhere in researching (here maybe? Can’t find it now…) that if I try to restore my cloned drive from my WD Essential back to an internal that isn’t a WD drive, it won’t work. One reason I found the Acronis software at all is because I suppose I should make a clone in case my drive fails. If I use the Acronis software, do I need the WD software installed at all, or can Acronis do all of the backup features of the WD software? I read the Acronis manual and it seems pretty inclusive, but again, I’m pretty ignorant here, so ease plays a factor. I’m really new to this, and came across a couple of questions, so thought I should stop and ask before I even plug the thing in.

I just bought a new WD Essential external drive that I want to use only for backing up my laptop’s internal.

Should i install wd drive utilities