(Image: Shutterstock) Your hard drive hasn't been acting the same lately. It's starting to make clicking or screeching noises, it can't seem to find your files, and it's moving really slowly. It might be time to say farewell, but here's what you should do before it goes to the big data center in the sky. Every hard drive dies eventually, and when it's near death, you'll see the signs. Strange noises, corrupted files, crashing during boot, and glacial transfer speeds all point to the inevitable end. This is normal, especially if your drive is more than a few years old. On older spinning drives, moving parts like the motor can degrade over time, or the drives' magnetic sectors can go bad.