Disk Failure Is Imminent


ChaosWarmech

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NOOOOOO! So I'm using 2 Seagate HDDs I bought from Newegg a few years ago, and just a few minute ago Disk Utility(ubuntu) just popped up telling me that the one that houses my Win7 install is failing. It says there are 2734 bad sectors, what errors would this cause? And how long do you think I have until it dies completely? Seeing as I just bought my Pandy this paycheck I don't have the money right now for a new HDD...


Also, do you think I should expect my 2nd drive to fail soon too, since they are both exactly the same and bought at the same time?
 
Were they internal or external? I'm no expert, just curious.


I've always had really bad luck with seagates (maybe just me). I had a few go down with the click of death, and I lost 6 years of data on one because I only had one, and didn't keep any redundant backups. The platters separated from the motor, something literally just let go of the platters and the long-arm pretty much scratched the plates to bits. It was an external, I suppose it was cause I was too rough with it at times when it clearly wasn't warranted for. After that I switched to western digital black's because they add extra supports on both ends to protect it from tilting, and other junk.


I don't know if your second one will fail, but I'd sure as hell back it up the best you can in case it does. [/obvious]


The disk utility generally tells me that when you start to get bad sectors because of surface damage, the whole drive may or may not go completely dead. And normally when you have bad sectors, you normally cannot read certain files. Like I said before, don't quote me, I'm no expert at all.
 
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The number of damaged sectors you have is enough for not turning the HD on anymore but for one reason, a full backup.


Nobody can tell you how the disk will be. If the bad sectors are growing the disk is going to die. If the number stabilizes it may possible that the disk will continue to work for years. Its also possible that the disk will be unaccessable within the next n-minutes. I have a 40gb which can't initialize any more, sounding like rapid tack tack tack with power on, died from one second to the other. Any statistical calculation is useless for determining _your_ hardware failure time - if it dies earlier it will be.


One thing is sure, your hardware _will_ fail some day. My 200MB (yes, not GB) died lately, a Conner CP3294F, 683/16/38, i can't remember or find out the production date, must be around 1992. The disk ran 24/7 since the year 2000 and i think it served well. This was low density technology. My personal opinion is with more and more capacity the risk of a failure arises. Todays "lean" production hardware is calculated to survive the warranty time. People store hundreds of GB data on a single disk. What is this data? What is it worth? How many hours of work are in there? How many pictures you would like to see some day to remember the past? What is that worth to you?


If your two disks are the same, from the same vendor, with the same postage, they got similar handling. The usage of the disks may vary, but as written before nobody can tell you when it fails. If you got your new disk, i suggest to do a badblock analysis first. That may take several hours but it's worth it. I got 2 new disks with already detectable badblocks, which were replaced by warranty without further notice.
 
It's a 2.5" internal. These two were replacing the WD drive that died in a similar manner, which is why I went with seagate. I have all my important files in one folder that's backed up in multiple locations so I'm not worried about data loss. It's a laptop I probably just moved it one too many times with the drive running. I installed a fresh Win7 on the good drive, but I'll probably try to use the other install just to see how long it lasts and see what happens when it finally bites the dust. It's weird though because chkdsk didn't come up with any errors, and Windows never popped up with a warning like it did last time. How come chkdsk didn't find them?
 
It's a 2.5" internal. These two were replacing the WD drive that died in a similar manner, which is why I went with seagate. I have all my important files in one folder that's backed up in multiple locations so I'm not worried about data loss. It's a laptop I probably just moved it one too many times with the drive running. I installed a fresh Win7 on the good drive, but I'll probably try to use the other install just to see how long it lasts and see what happens when it finally bites the dust. It's weird though because chkdsk didn't come up with any errors, and Windows never popped up with a warning like it did last time. How come chkdsk didn't find them?
Even so I'd get a back up of critical files onto the other hard drive (critical files meaning irreplaceable things like documents, pictures, things you made, save-files), buy a new hard drive since the price per gigabyte is practically free. I mean... you can get a 2 TB hard drive for $150, smaller for even less. Sure, it is a bit of an investment, however after 4 hard drive crashes, I don't dare to play around with "it may work for another few years". Russian roulette just isn't my kind of game.


If you can't afford it and don't have space to make a backup on the other harddrive, I'd disconnect the drive completely, and wait until I could afford it. Also, remember, when you but hard drives in pairs, it is always smart to get two different brands of hard drives, since that makes the probability of both dying at the same time a bit less.
 
doh... not really related, but my WDears seems to have died as of yesterday... I had no important information on it and my OS was on a SSD, but still that suck... and I had just finished to download my full Steam game collection.


downloading 120Gb through a bad/low connection really suck...
 
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ears is one of their drive categories, from the top of my head, ears/eads are the green drives, the ones that use less power, theres the green ones, the blue ones, and the black ones, all have different model letters they go by, one of them is EARS
 
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ears is one of their drive categories, from the top of my head, ears/eads are the green drives, the ones that use less power, theres the green ones, the blue ones, and the black ones, all have different model letters they go by, one of them is EARS

exactly... sudden death from a less than 3month old drive really suck...
 
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