Question Is my hard drive dead?

[rh71]

WIN10 OS. Have a Toshiba 2TB internal HDD connected via SATA that I was using as D: for storage of home media files. C: is an SSD. D: was about 70% full I believe, and within the last few months I've noticed copying to and from the drive was extremely slow at times. It would only go at about 10MB/s or less. Not making any weird noises though. Other HDD's E: and F: currently transfer at about 50MB/s or so.

I was just doing a copy from one folder to another on D: and it eventually just hit 0MB/s. I rebooted the PC (which took nearly 10 minutes - has happened in the past) and now the D: isn't even appearing in Computer. Disk Management shows it as not initialized but neither option to initialize disk (MBR & GPT) are working.

I may try to pull the drive out tomorrow and re-seat it but are these symptoms of a dead/dying drive? I only have a backup from a couple months ago so I'd still like to get to the data one last time and try to copy whatever I can.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I may try to pull the drive out tomorrow and re-seat it but are these symptoms of a dead/dying drive?

Sadly, YES! Declining (substantially) transfer rates can indicate a failing HDD, even when all other signs point to it being OK.

 

[UsandThem]

I may try to pull the drive out tomorrow and re-seat it but are these symptoms of a dead/dying drive? I only have a backup from a couple months ago so I'd still like to get to the data one last time and try to copy whatever I can.

It sure sounds like it's dead or dying.

A handy utility to run every now and then to see your drive's health is this one: https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

Hopefully it will last long enough to get some of your data (if it's not totally dead). Drives can really go without warning at times, so current backups are always the way to go on data you can't afford to lose.

 

[rh71]

UPDATE:

I re-plugged it in (SATA and power) and it seems to be alive and well again. Transfer speeds are whole again (backing up everything now). Maybe it just needed a cold-boot, not sure, but just ordered a Seagate Ironwolf 6TB to replace it.