failing hard drive

[pursuant]

I suspect my hard drive is failing. I use itunes and over the last few months it continually looses files . It was suggested to me that this might be due to a hard drive starting to failing. I have run checkdisk a couple of times but am unsure how to read the results. Other than Itunes the pc seems to be working (Dell Win7) well enough for a 3 year old machine. Some lagging and slow boot up. How can I tell if this is the problem and what can be done?

Thanks

[DaveLembke]

crystaldiskinfo should be run on this. It will display drive health. If crystaldiskinfo reports it back as healthy then you have something else going on . I use the portable zip standard free edition on this list of options: http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html

[pursuant]

great, I downloaded and ran the program I think, it ran so quickly, its hard to believe it did the job. It seems to indicate that my hard drive is in good condition, please see attached image. Is that correct?

[attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]

[DaveLembke]

Hard Drive looks healthy. I have yet to find a hard drive report healthy that isnt.

Does anyone else have access to this computer who might accidentally delete files?

It might be an iTunes bug too. Google search shows lots of people complaining about songs missing. https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=itunes+losing+files

[pursuant]

thanks
No I am the only one who uses it, so we are fine on that point. I too have seen the reports of missing files in Itunes. Iv'e looked at several of those posts and I don't think the issues are mine but I will double check. So from what I sent, the drive looks good then? That a relief ...i was already looking at costs of new ones and how to install them.

Thanks again

[DaveLembke]

99.9% certain that the drive is healthy and still good.

A good backup plan should be in place in case the drive should ever fail though. re you performing any backup of data and music to a external USB drive etc? If you havent, then that is where I would spend some money, and get a drive large enough to store your important data. Drives can fail at any time. Sometimes they give you warning, and if it was failing and still functional then there should be info picked up by crystaldiskinfo, however even the system I am on now typing this could suffer a drive failure right after posting this. Drives are generally pretty rugged and long operating life, but they can just completely fail without warning at any time, so I would suggest a good backup of your system for your important data if you dont already have a backup.

[pursuant]

Thanks again. Yes i have WD external 500gig drive I use for backup of my pictures and music files. I have a few other files I'd like to keep and I store them here and in the cloud. The problem came up when I was missing various music files while using Itunes.
I have been in contact with an itunes guy in one of their forums. He seems to feel it most likely is a drive problem still. He doesn't know of any software issues with Itunes that could cause the missing files.
I

[DaveLembke]

The fact that the data loss is only iTunes is odd. If the drive was failing there should be error conditions stored and shown on crystaldiskinfo. Additionally your computer is always reading and writing data and so if a drive is failing to lose data, you should be getting BSOD's etc as swap space ( virtual memory ) gets corrupted etc and having other stability issues as well as data loss elsewhere as well. So I doubt its the hard drive. 

[patio]

8 times out of 10 when i've seen this it's the iTunes software itself that either doesn't save files properly...or does it poorly.
Example...i moved my uncles tunes library to free up space on his HDD to an external...there was 20+G of unusble file space which i attributed to either broken or interrupted file transfers...

[BC_Programmer]

I've never seen a Hard Disk fail silently.

That is, I've never had a drive fail in a way where files dissappear. When a disk drive fails- you know it. Loud clicking sounds from the drive; the drive disappears from the system; if it's your boot drive, it fails to boot sometimes, or you get boot device errors, or it hangs during the boot.

Are you able to go to your music library location (I'm not familiar with iTunes but I suspect that is how it works) and see if you can find the missing songs? I believ ethe default is in your user profile folder under Music.

He doesn't know of any software issues with Itunes that could cause the missing files.

A Google search shows that it is likely his knowledge failing here, not your hard disk. Allegedly using iCloud and/or the recent 12.2 update can lead to missing tracks.

[patio]

He doesn't know of any software issues with Itunes that could cause the missing files.

You expected him to say so if he did ? ?