Samsung external drive flaking out, any fixes?

[Erithan13]

I bought a Samsung D3 station about 7 months ago for use as an offsite backup drive. It's been fine the last few times I brought it home to update the backup, I use Macrium Reflect to differential image my main drive to the Samsung drive and also a Toshiba external drive as a local backup. Toshiba drive has been flawless, this Samsung one....well it's a Seagate drive inside it and it seems the curse of Seagate has struck yet again, the reviews for the drive have many people finding the drive becoming unreliable after a few months.

It started with Macrium giving me 'write aborted' errors a little way into the copying process. There's some write caching options that are supposed to alleviate this and they have helped a bit as it now takes longer before it aborts, but basically I have not been able to successfully add the differential image yet (about 2-3 hours projected time given the last backup was a while back and I've updated a lot). Apparently the drive is intermittently disconnecting itself and reappearing, I've noticed it doing this myself in windows explorer.

It's not the USB cable or power supply as these both work fine with the Toshiba drive. CHKDSK reports no problems either. I can copy small files/folders back and forth just fine, the problem arises over the several hours needed for the image.

Is there anything else at all I can try to stop the drive flaking out on me? At this point I'm about to order a Western Digital external drive as a replacement since I really don't want to be taking chances with a suspect backup.

 

[C1]

"WIPE" the drive then do a long format.

 

[Elixer]

Use crystaldiskinfo to see if it can detect the status of the drive in question. I am thinking the drive is on the way out.
They will all fail sooner or later, there is no getting around that.

I would NOT wipe/format the drive if the SMART status shows any signs of bad blocks. Those drives should only be used for scrap/temp stuff IMO.

 

[bryanl]

3 year warranty on the D3, but this drive is not difficult to open:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56RI5ypZ4Rg

Though I suggest you not use a sharp knife.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I bought a Samsung D3 Station 5TB external desktop HDD from Newegg.

The enclosure is absolutely crap.

Mine constantly dropped off of the USB3.0 bus, had errors, etc.

"Shucked" the drive, and had no problems using the internal drive with my SATA to USB3.0 drive dock.

It appears that the drive inside is fine, but the enclosure sucks.

I suggest shucking it, there's a YouTube video for instructions.

Note that the enclosure uses 4K sectors over USB3.0 to be compatible with XP. Which means that your data currently on the drive will NOT be readable once you shuck it. You'll have to wipe it and re-partition it (GPT).

 

[tweakboy]

Go with WDC for external drives. youll be fine.

 

[TheRyuu]

Note that the enclosure uses 4K sectors over USB3.0 to be compatible with XP. Which means that your data currently on the drive will NOT be readable once you shuck it. You'll have to wipe it and re-partition it (GPT).

Isn't 4k the new format though? Do you mean it uses some 4k to 512 trickery to remain compatible with XP?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Isn't 4k the new format though? Do you mean it uses some 4k to 512 trickery to remain compatible with XP?

The drive inside is not 4KN, it's 512e, with 4K AF internally. But the enclosure makes the 512e appear as 4K sectors over USB Mass Storage.

 

[Erithan13]

I bought a Samsung D3 Station 5TB external desktop HDD from Newegg.

The enclosure is absolutely crap.

Mine constantly dropped off of the USB3.0 bus, had errors, etc.

"Shucked" the drive, and had no problems using the internal drive with my SATA to USB3.0 drive dock.

It appears that the drive inside is fine, but the enclosure sucks.

I suggest shucking it, there's a YouTube video for instructions.

Note that the enclosure uses 4K sectors over USB3.0 to be compatible with XP. Which means that your data currently on the drive will NOT be readable once you shuck it. You'll have to wipe it and re-partition it (GPT).

Thanks, very useful info

I got the WD drive as a replacement for the backup, at least that's safe while I figure out what to do with this Samsung. I'll see what the warranty situation is, the thing I'm worried about is the drive still 'works' in as far as it turns on and can be accessed and small file transfers are fine. If I RMA it I have to hope they can see the problem with it. I don't know if it's worth the effort. I might have better luck ripping the drive out and selling it to get some of my money back.

 

[r24x7]

Hi Guys ,

I'm kind of in a similar situation here with my Toshiba Canvio Desk 2 TB Drive. This one is a full sized 3.5" External HDD with power supply. Over a period of almost 2 Years with very occasional usage , I had accumulated data of around 1.4 TB.

Since past month or so , I have started noticing that some of the files , when accessed / attempted copied onto my local Desktop , would not work or the transfer process stops / freezes abruptly AND would make my desktop force an interrupted system restart.

The same file when tried with my Laptop , it does not work here either , except my laptop doesn't seem to restart , yet the file transfer just freezes. No progress even after several minutes / couple of hours. The Status in task manager -> Resource Manager shows that Drive activity is at 100%.


What does this mean? Does it mean that my drive has developed bad sectors? Can it be fixed?

I google'd and saw that this can "probably" be fixed with a chkdsk /r command. How far is this true? Can the clusters be recovered, for like real?

I went ahead and ran the suggested approach but it seemed to be taking forever and consumed entire 6 GB of ram on my Laptop , basically cant use my laptop for anything else during this time. Also , assuming that it would end at some point I have managed to wait it out for 10 hours at most. I couldn't any longer due to frequent power cuts at home( Remember this is a full sized HDD with external power supply and not something that runs off the USB port). Every time it restarts , It starts from zero again and does not seem to resume its process.The farthest I could reach was Stage 4/5 - 16,300 Files / 58,000 files.

While not all files are inaccessible , only some show this behavior , I'm already in process of backing up all files that are still not corrupted and accessible.

My last question is , if I manage to recover most files that are safe and leave the drive only with files that are Corrupted / not accessible , would it give lesser amount of data to be processed for the CHKDSK utility program? Will the process end sooner this way?

Thanks
Rohan

 

[VirtualLarry]

If the external drive is dying (and it sounds like it is), CHKDSK isn't going to fix it. Get what you can off of it, and destroy it (if you had anything personal on it).

Makes sure that you have anything important in triplicate storage in the future.

 

[r24x7]

Okay! Thank you! I have ordered a new 2 TB drive - WD Elements Portable to rescue all the data on my dying drive. Will revert to the thread once I'm done transferring all accessible files for any possible revival tips for the drive.

 

[r24x7]

Quick Update - I was able to back up almost all of the data except for 2 files summing the size to 14 GB.

Now , I ran the same thing , chkdsk /r and it finished everything in 5-6 hours. Seems like my assumption was right. CHKDSK runs faster will less or no data on drive. It also gave messages on screen that the two files had to be moved to new sectors since they were on bad sectors.

Now , I am able to copy , move these files without any issues.

And.. I also happened to have the .torrent files for these files , So , I just chose the ext. HDD as download location and made a force re-check of status to estimate the extent of damage. Saw that around 25 mb of data was missing on both files together.

Now that all of this done , is the drive good enough to be used again? ( of course with discretion) or best recommended to be never used again?

 

[bryanl]

Run a diagnostic that shows the amount of time needed to read sectors, as marginal ones may have to be read 10-20 times to be read successfully. One such program is HDDscan.