Diagnosing these Hard Drives

[Perene]

I had this Samsung HD753LJ since at least March 2009. In November 2014 I changed the entire hardware and one day later the HDD had this clicking sound. BSOD before that. It was all normal, then another clicking sound and this time Windows didn't change a bit.

https://vimeo.com/112346199

This video has both moments. In the 2nd time the drive became invisible. BIOS did not recognize it, Windows neither. Technicians said the drive could not be used anymore. It's dead. I didn't ask a company that tries to restore HDD data what is the condition of this model and what can be saved (if any data).

Before that I need some advice from you about my chances of getting anything back. The drive had 275 GB of free space from 698 GB.

I also have a 2nd 750 GB drive, which didn't die, but it has a very similar screen compared to the first. My guess is that improper handling of the drive or even shipping to this location inadequately caused this death. That's for sure.

Look at the surviving 750 GB Samsung status:

Is it possible this drive could die tomorrow or last for another 1, 2 years? What are the odds?

I remember using HDTune and the dead HDD didn't show any red warning.

There's also this one, purchased in 2006, but used less than Samsung's. However, it was kept in a case in a room taking dust and not being used, for at least 3, 4 years. When I removed this Seagate drive from the old case it was like I was handling a 50-year machine.

 

[Charlie98]

Drives are a consumable commodity... it looks like you need to do some HDD shopping. I wouldn't trust any of the ones that are showing errors.

 

[Elixer]

Yeah...time for new HDs.
You still can use them for unimportant stuff, since, once they start getting sector errors, it just goes downhill, and can never get better.

Oh, and yeah, they can fail at any time.

 

[Perene]

Drives are a consumable commodity... it looks like you need to do some HDD shopping. I wouldn't trust any of the ones that are showing errors.

I bought this one:



It's a WD Blue 1 TB. It looks like this and the Seagate one are faster than this old Samsung, right? After doing some research I came up with the conclusion Seagate drives are unreliable due to many complaints. It seems older HDDs lasted longer than new ones.

But the sad thing about these drives is that they would last a lot longer if I didn't change my entire hardware and moved them from the case. The funny thing is that the click of death happened without any warning, besides these yellow flags on HDTune. Yellow, not red.

 

[Charlie98]

It's a WD Blue 1 TB. It looks like this and the Seagate one are faster than this old Samsung, right? After doing some research I came up with the conclusion Seagate drives are unreliable due to many complaints. It seems older HDDs lasted longer than new ones.

But the sad thing about these drives is that they would last a lot longer if I didn't change my entire hardware and moved them from the case. The funny thing is that the click of death happened without any warning, besides these yellow flags on HDTune. Yellow, not red.

What I don't understand is... why would moving a drive from one box to another suddenly render errors? Unless you dropped it or it saw some sort of electrical issue (static, overvolt, etc) there is no reason they should have suddenly errored out.

Seagate drives are not unreliable... or at least I hope not... I have something like 10 of them in service. Every manufacturer turns out a lemon or two. The only HDD I've ever had to RMA was a WD Red... bad sectors right out of the box... but that doesn't mean WD makes bad drives. Seagate did have a bad series of drives, the famous '.11' drives, but, in my experience, everything since has been very reliable.

As Elixer says... HDDs can fail at ANY time.

 

[Perene]

What I don't understand is... why would moving a drive from one box to another suddenly render errors? Unless you dropped it or it saw some sort of electrical issue (static, overvolt, etc) there is no reason they should have suddenly errored out.

You can mess with a HDD in many ways. They are very fragile and if you touch the chip components with your fingers, don't worry about electrostatic discharge, use it in an inadequate scenario (with a bad UPS, for example), plus use improper package (see this link), and submit this drive to any bump while it's being transported from one place to another (even in the same room), I guess the life expectancy is greatly diminished.

So if this HDD had 60 years old (4.5-5 years), it aged 30 years only with a single one of these things done.

Seagate drives always had problems with plenty of customers since the company purchased Maxtor in the 2000's and had an entire lot of 1.5 TB drives defective. Ever since them they had more problems with their large HDDs than what you may consider a mere accident.

Their drives don't last more than 2 years, which is the warranty they give you, at best they will fail months after that, and most of them fail within the 2-year period.

If there's any doubt about that, just search for Newegg/Amazon/other forums comments about how reliable Seagate is, and statistics such as this.


My advice is to invest only in SSDs, and use the internet for backups. I was using, but you can never move all your data out of any drive before the ultimate demise...

 

[Perene]

Situation:

I started using this old Seagate SATA drive and look at how bad it is now:

http://i.imgur.com/83xtDOi.png

When I try to delete files/folders they remain there. Chkdsk says there is not enough disk space to correct errors. HDTune said before after verifying the drive it had 2 % badblocks.

And the most strange thing: DEFRAG lists all Hard Drives and the SSD... not this Seagate drive, which is still being used and recognized in Windows.

Why is that?

 

[Elixer]

It could be that the defragger checked the drive and saw it was too far gone to reliably defrag anything.
The drive is in a death spiral.
Keep using it, and maybe the heads will crash.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Why are you keeping your HDDs for 5+ years, OP? You should be purchasing new ones every three years and copying your data over. (Well, you should be buying backup HDDs in addition to your primary HDDs, and making regular backups.)

 

[Perene]

Why are you keeping your HDDs for 5+ years, OP? You should be purchasing new ones every three years and copying your data over. (Well, you should be buying backup HDDs in addition to your primary HDDs, and making regular backups.)

I have purchased the WD Blue 1 TB. So far I managed to remove 90% of things from this Seagate 300 GB and I am still doing the same in the Samsung 750 GB. The reason these drives are still here it's because they are still alive, that's obvious. While they are slow compared to this new WD, I can tell you in the past HDDs lasted a lot longer.

Nowadays people complain too much Hard Drives fail in a very short period of time. I was not going to buy a new Hard Drive if this Samsung didn't fail after I brought to technicians to replace my old hardware and failed 1-2 days after.

I am already using the Samsung EVO 840 120 GB SSD for my OS.

All my backups are sent to archive.org (with the "true" option set in noindex, to avoid others asking to remove contents). I always advocated the use of internet for personal backups, never store your contents anywhere but the internet.

 

[Perene]

Can you believe this Seagate 300 GB is now...dead?

Once again I lost a HDD less than a month after installing new hardware.

This 300 GB was acquired in the beginning of 2006 but remained in a room with dust for at least 3 years. Installed in a new machine recently.

Lucky for me I already moved the relevant data from it and the remaining files were not important, replaceable by just downloading.

A few facts:

1) In the interval of November 19 and today (27) you can see the problems increased dramatically. No specific reason for that - I just started using the drive more often to either play videos, copy or convert them from DVD to Matroska. These activities are known to really stress any drive. So if this HDD was going to last 3 months, doing that accelerated its death to 3 weeks at best.

2) I noticed defrag was not recognizing the drive while it was still alive;

3) And after deleting files/folders they were still there in the drive. Don't remember specific chkdsk messages, but one of them said it could not correct the drive due to lack of disk space to perform a task. I remember the drive had about 60 GB used space of 279.

4) Windows is again taking some time to start. Since it's installed in a SSD, it should not take even 10 seconds. And I noticed it took more time when the Samsung 750 GB SATA drive died. At the time it took a minute. This is a i7 4770 using Windows 8.1 (64 bit).

I will remove the dead drive from the motherboard.

This time the Hard Drive did not make any sound while dying. The death is not 100% unpredictable if you keep checking these HDTune statistics.

If they only increase over time, death and lost of data (if there is no way to recover, something only technicians that deal with recovering dead Hard Drives can tell) is iminent.

Always do backups. All of them ASAP, as you can see I was still using the drive and by just restarting Windows I could not use it anymore.

 

[mikeymikec]

Why are you keeping your HDDs for 5+ years, OP? You should be purchasing new ones every three years and copying your data over. (Well, you should be buying backup HDDs in addition to your primary HDDs, and making regular backups.)

If it ain't broke, don't fix it?

IIRC some HDD longevity research in recent years suggested that drives are most likely to fail in the first five years then are likely to last somewhat longer.

By drive hopping purely based on their age, IMO you're inviting an assumption that a new drive is more reliable than an old one.

Admittedly I don't think I've kept a primary HDD for more than five years (except my old server's 60GB IDE disk, used from ~2003 to 2013 and only retired due to an entire platform upgrade), but I upgraded for performance/capacity reasons rather based on assumptions regarding their reliability.

I've seen drives fail anywhere between 3 months of age to 6-8 years I'd say, and that a graph plot of the ages would show a lot more failures earlier on than later.

This 300 GB was acquired in the beginning of 2006 but remained in a room with dust for at least 3 years. Installed in a new machine recently.

I put electronic, mechanical and biological things all in the same category on one point - they shouldn't be left idle.

----

On the question of "are drives failing more often these days", through my work I don't think so, but I do think that people are becoming more reliant on data storage so therefore the possibility of data loss is more remarkable these days.

 

[Perene]

I just opened the case and removed the HDD. It was very hard to remove the HDD itself from the case slot, it was attached to it and I had to force the sides of it. The HDD even jumped and fell in my bed. It wasn't attached with screws. Once in the case slot it is not removed easily.

One more thing I noticed is that I could not unplug the SATA/motherboard power cable from the HDD simply by using my hands. That is because the case itself is small, and I can't reach the back. Had to force the HDD upwards until it was unplugged. I have no idea how the technicians managed to connect everything. Perhaps the SATA/power cable were not connected properly to this drive. One evidence of that is the "Interface CRC Error Count" from HDTune statistics.

There is a possibility this HDD can be recovered more easily than the Samsung 750, there was no click of death this time.

I regret leaving the Lian Li case behind for sale...

That was my old case:
http://postimg.org/image/c5fj66foj/