Troubleshooting Storage Devices - CompTIA A+ 220-1201 - 5.2

If you're working on your computer and you get a message that says cannot read from the source disc or an error message that's very similar to this, then our problem is that we're either not able to write to the storage drive or read the information that has already been stored on the storage drive. When this occurs,

you'll often see the drive constantly retrying that particular area to see if it can finally read the information that's stored either on the platters of the hard drive or the SSD. This type of failure could affect only a certain area of the storage drive or it may be an intermittent type problem. Whenever it's

occurring, you'll notice that the performance of reading and writing from the drive becomes very slow because if the drive ever runs into this error, it will constantly try to retry the read or the write to that particular area of the drive. That retry takes time as it tries over and over to try to either read that

data or write information into that area of the drive. Sometimes this is a loud clicking noise, especially if it's a hard drive that we're trying to access. Sometimes you'll hear people refer to this as the click of death because once your hard drive starts making these clicking noises, it's very difficult to recover any of that

data. These hard drives have platters inside that are spinning very rapidly, often at 5,400 revolutions per minute and higher. There are also these actuator arms that have heads on the end that are moving back and forth across those platters, and those can also have physical failures. All of these components have very high tolerances,

and if any one of them happens to fail, it often creates a cascade effect with all of the other parts of the spinning drive. You'll also notice that a lot of these components are metal. So, when you do start to have a failure, you'll start to hear clicking noises or grinding noises or the sounds of metal on metal.