Dying Hard Drive?

[krnmastersgt]

As for this drive, it's been running for approximately 10k-11k hours since the birth of my current rig and it's had Vista for the majority of the time, with the scheduled weekly defrag that Vista has. Drive is approximately 2 years old.

So today when I was checking up on things on my computer as well as lining up some music it suddenly seemed to freeze on me (which it has never done in its entire life aside from failed OC BSODs), I turned off the system with the "hold the power button for 5 seconds" method, which I don't like using but have used before. Then started the clicking, which I believed to be more or less synonymous with death of a hard drive.

I let it reboot as I go to get a drink, when I come back about 3-4 minutes later it's still on the Vista loading bar, I restart again and find that Windows also believes that the drive is having issues and decides to run CHKDSK so I let that run and it comes across as clean, so I know the files are perfectly intact still.

It reboots by itself and hangs on the loading bar much more than normal BUT it did successfully boot into Windows, once I got in it seemed to be more or less fine, but the worrying thing is the age/amount of defrags I've run on it (especially lately with manual defrags). The drive doesn't make a consistent series of clicks, rather just randomly clicks once in a while so I've searched the threads and found it shouldn't be too huge a problem but still a worrying notion of soon to be mechanical failure (500GB Seagate Barracuda btw if anyone was interested).

I don't back up anything because all the files I have are easily replaced and my personal/important files are not stored on this primary hard drive.

Now that I've basically described what just happened to the drive (writing from my laptop) I'm running the system as I normally do, no noises coming from the drive in the past 15 minutes but I'm wondering if anyone had any tips on preventing total failure/helping it stop the clicking. That, or just how long does my precious hard drive have before it completely croaks?

 

[ScorcherDarkly]

Once the click starts, death is inevitable. If you care about the data, stop using the drive altogether, and clone the data to a new drive once you are able. If you don't care about the data, I guess you can use it til it dies, but that sounds damn inconvenient.

 

[krnmastersgt]

Nothing important to really save off it, what I'm wondering right now though is why the clicking stopped. Maybe it was just a random hiccup and not a sign foretelling its death?

 

[Russwinters]

If it's under warranty I would send it in.

First, Vista doesn't let SMART work on most HDD...annoying.

SMART will predict failure of the disk for you, or at least try..haha


Plug the disk into a system thats not vista or 7, and use a program like:

http://hddscan.com/

to check the SMART data.

Look at the RAW for the pending sectors count and reallocated sectors count

pending meant those are the number of sector the drive has found to be bad and will be adding them to the reallocated sectors count soon

reallocated sectors count is the number of bad sectors that have been reallocated by the drive (reallocated mean replaced by reserve sectors that the disk has pre set from the factory)

If there are ANY, i wouldn't use the drive anymore personally.

Even if you drive was running on vista, it keeps track of smart internally.

Hard drives actually scan themselves regularly during operation; they are constantly updating tables, and calibration data. Many things are going on that the user is unaware of. That is why it is dangerous to power down a drive out of nowhere, it could be updating something important and only get part of the way done, if it does that then the sector will return BAD, and thats how firmware gets trashed.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Hard drives actually scan themselves regularly during operation; they are constantly updating tables, and calibration data. Many things are going on that the user is unaware of. That is why it is dangerous to power down a drive out of nowhere, it could be updating something important and only get part of the way done, if it does that then the sector will return BAD, and thats how firmware gets trashed.

I was under the impression that HDs that lose power in teh middle of writing a sector complete the sector write and then retract the heads. Is that not true?

This may change with the "advanced format" drives, they probably don't have enough reserve power to complete a write of a larger sector.

 

[Russwinters]

I was under the impression that HDs that lose power in teh middle of writing a sector complete the sector write and then retract the heads. Is that not true?

This may change with the "advanced format" drives, they probably don't have enough reserve power to complete a write of a larger sector.

They certainly try, but using only power that is created by the rotation of the spindle is not reliable.

Manufacturers claim they have lots of safe guards implement, but the fact is that drives still fail because of sudden power loss, so the systems implemented are not fullproof by all means.


I have a feeling your right about Advanced format drives, unless the manufacturers have some new safeguard up their sleeve that they haven't talked about yet. We will know soon enough the first Advanced format drives are hitting the shelves soon, these first drives will be "hybrid" drives that can be treated like a 512byte sector drive, but will actually translate onto the disk in 4K sectors, even though OS thinks it's 512byte.

This is going to cause lots of problems...I am not looking forward to the recovery of these transitional "hybrid" drives.....an extra step in the translator is the last thing I want to deal with.