How to Tell If Your Apple Laptop Disk Drive is Failing

Eventually, your hard drive will fail. Hard drives are expected to last between 3 to 5 years before they eventually fail.

How do you know when your time is up with a hard drive?

•  Your computer starts to slow down. (but a slow computer can be caused by other things besides a failing hard drive.)
• Run the Disk Utility in the Utilities Folder. Select Repair Permission (controls access to programs) first, then verify Hard Drive, last. Both these scans can take some time to complete and will make using your Apple laptop difficult, if not  impossible during these scans. If you have Permissions that cannot be repaired, please refer to this Apple article to determine if this is something to worry about:  

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1448?viewlocale=en_US

• To repair errors found while verifying your hard drive, you must boot your laptop using the installation DVD that came with your laptop and run the Disk Utility from the DVD.
• If you find that your permissions cannot be repaired (outside the errors that are OK to have as reported by the Apple article) or your hard drive cannot be repaired with the Disk Utility, it is time to start backing up your data. It is only a matter of time before your laptop will stop booting because the hard drive has failed.