Dying drive! Help!

[ryan256]

I have a 3TB Seagate hard drive that is about to die. Problem is there is ALOT of data on this thing I need to get off. I had it all backed up on a NAS but the backups on that thing got messed up. So I was going to just redo it. Reestablish the backup with a correct file structure. It was in the process of doing this that I discovered that my 3TB drive is dying. I can plug it in and browse the file structure. Sometimes I can even succeed in copying off a file or 2. But eventually the disk usage will shoot up to 100% and the file i/o will drop to 0. Once that happens forget it. You're not getting anything else off the disk unless you unplug it, wait a few minutes, and plug it back in.
Other than data recovery, anyone have an idea on how I can pull the data off of this drive before it croaks?

 

[Billy Tallis]

I'm guessing this is the notorious ST3000DM001 model. This failure was inevitable; you're lucky it lasted this long. I only use them in RAID because they're so unreliable. Chilling the drive may help, but be careful about condensation when you pull it out of the freezer.

 

[ryan256]

I'm guessing this is the notorious ST3000DM001 model. This failure was inevitable; you're lucky it lasted this long. I only use them in RAID because they're so unreliable. Chilling the drive may help, but be careful about condensation when you pull it out of the freezer.

Yep.... thats the exact drive model. I actually have an external USB cradle I can leave in the freezer and try to access the drive. Think that might help??