HDD failing

Author
Discussion

Drive Blind

Original Poster:

5,250 posts

184 months

Thursday 31st October
quotequote all
Hello,

3TB WD drive I've had in my system for at least 5 years. Nothing important on it just used for media storage.
Copying some files off the drive a few days ago it just hung up.
It's about 90% full.

chkdsk /f reported no errors
chkdsk /r ran for about 30 hours, didnt complete, hung up.

Crystal disk report says,



can it be saved, is it worth saving? When these errors start is it the beginning of the end?

camel_landy

5,084 posts

190 months

Thursday 31st October
quotequote all
5x years for a load of spinning rust...

Get the data off while you can and throw in the skip.

M

wyson

2,696 posts

111 months

Thursday 31st October
quotequote all
Not worth investigating for the sake of £60. How much is your time worth? Get as much data off as you can and ditch it.

I’ve had a couple go, it’s silly random stuff like this in the beginning, that just gets worse. The first failure, I tried to diagnose it, reformatted it, reinstalled windows etc. It was such a massive waste of time. Must have spent a two or three evenings in it, before the disk stopped spinning up altogether.

My friend who works in a data centre told me they are considered disposable items, tiny squeak of a failure out of one, it gets pulled out of the rack and chucked. No one wastes time trying to figure out what the problem is.

I took the same mindset with the 2nd one that start booting with smart errors. Cloned it, chucked it.

Will also say, all these checks and scans you are doing, are probably helping its demise. Get the data off first if you must fiddle. Any whiff of a failure, getting the data off should be the first port of call.

Edited by wyson on Friday 1st November 07:49

eeLee

856 posts

87 months

Friday 1st November
quotequote all
If you can copy (xcopy or robocopy) the data off it to a new drive, that's probably a good sunset for the drive.

SMART will be reporting errors, you could do a low-level format on the drive after copying the contents off and it might be useful for non-critical data storage.

captain_cynic

13,322 posts

102 months

Friday 1st November
quotequote all
I've had some positively ancient HDDs... At least you get some warning with spinning rust, had my 2 TB SSD go a few months ago with absolutely no warning. Just stopped working one day, just a few days out from being 4 yes old. It was just my steam drive so nothing of value was lost but still annoying.

However the advice is still the same. No point in trying to save the drive, HDDs are cheap, get a replacement and copy the data across.

camel_landy

5,084 posts

190 months

Friday 1st November
quotequote all
wyson said:
My friend who works in a data centre told me they are considered disposable items, tiny squeak of a failure out of one, it gets pulled out of the rack and chucked. No one wastes time trying to figure out what the problem is.
Yep... Part of my role is to manage data centre kit and in there I have a Ceph cluster (bigly lots of HDDs). 2x strikes and the HDD is swapped out. We monitor failure rates and use those figures for purchasing, so we can make sure we have enough spares on the shelf, ready to go.

HDDs are a consumable item; they're also a mechanical item, so it's not a case of 'IF' it fails, it's 'WHEN'. This is why HDDs quote figures for MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure).

M

Drive Blind

Original Poster:

5,250 posts

184 months

Friday 1st November
quotequote all
new hdd ordered, hopefully get it installed over the weekend. thumbup

Jinx

11,608 posts

267 months

Friday 1st November
quotequote all
That was quite a slow drive (5400 rpm) - If you can't justify an SSD (2TB are fairly reasonable now) I would probably aim for a 7200 rpm if you can. I always try to upgrade at least a little when something fails.

Drive Blind

Original Poster:

5,250 posts

184 months

Friday 1st November
quotequote all
Jinx said:
That was quite a slow drive (5400 rpm) - If you can't justify an SSD (2TB are fairly reasonable now) I would probably aim for a 7200 rpm if you can. I always try to upgrade at least a little when something fails.
it's just a media storage drive - 5400rpm is fine

the os is on an nvme ssd

Drive Blind

Original Poster:

5,250 posts

184 months

Friday 1st November
quotequote all
had a look at the failing hdd, date of manufacture is 2016.

my own fault for not realising I had so much stuff on such an old drive. D'oh, need to pay attention in future.

Jinx

11,608 posts

267 months

Saturday 2nd November
quotequote all
Drive Blind said:
had a look at the failing hdd, date of manufacture is 2016.

my own fault for not realising I had so much stuff on such an old drive. D'oh, need to pay attention in future.
You just made me look at my drives and yep one is at caution (2TB HDD - had it since 2017) so I'll be shopping as well.

duckson

1,264 posts

189 months

Saturday 2nd November
quotequote all
My very old Readynas Duo is still rocking 2 x 2TB Seagates that have been running 24/7 since 2011. biggrin

Drive Blind

Original Poster:

5,250 posts

184 months

Saturday 2nd November
quotequote all
Got my new hdd installed,, I went for an 8TB WD Blue

so far encountered about 35 files that won't copy across, out of the 6000+ files that are on the hdd.

I might leave it connected up and use it as an experiment to see if any tools or utilities can copy the affected files off the drive,, incase I ever need to do this in the future with more critical data.

captain_cynic

13,322 posts

102 months

Saturday 2nd November
quotequote all
Have you run a CHKDSK on the drive?

Drive Blind

Original Poster:

5,250 posts

184 months

Saturday 2nd November
quotequote all
captain_cynic said:
Have you run a CHKDSK on the drive?
not since my first attempt when the drive was 90% full

chkdsk /f reported no errors
chkdsk /r ran for about 30 hours, didnt complete, hung up.

Mandat

4,002 posts

245 months

Sunday 3rd November
quotequote all
Drive Blind said:
so far encountered about 35 files that won't copy across, out of the 6000+ files that are on the hdd.
Are you able to open the affected files?

If yes, open and then "save as" to the new location.

Derek Smith

46,490 posts

255 months

Sunday 3rd November
quotequote all
I had a 'catastrophic' failure of an HDD around 2005. The nightmare meant I wouldn't sleep unless I'd backed up the day's data on an external HDD. Best lesson I ever had, despite the loss.

Griffith4ever

4,764 posts

42 months

Sunday 3rd November
quotequote all
duckson said:
My very old Readynas Duo is still rocking 2 x 2TB Seagates that have been running 24/7 since 2011. biggrin
One of the biggest killers for kit is thermal shock each time they cool and warm. Leaving them on 247 helps immeasurably.

Drive Blind

Original Poster:

5,250 posts

184 months

Tuesday 5th November
quotequote all
so just to conclude this,
the 35 or so files that wouldn't copy, I eventually got that down to about 15. Some of the problem files would copy but it took hours.

I had to reboot my pc for another reason and now my mobo bios is telling me the hdd is bad.

CrystalDiskInfo has also now moved from caution to bad



hdd will be getting removed and skipped.