Hey guys/gals,
So I have an old Western Digital 2TB drive which appears to be on its way out. All the signs, along with the scans I've managed to run on it, tell me it has bad sectors, but what intrigues me is that I am still able to pull files from it!... It just takes forever to do so. When it hits a bad spot it crawls down to like 200 KB/sec.
The files I am copying are quite large (video files, roughly 10GB each), and it's as if it slowly works its way through the "damaged fragments" and every now and then leaps forward at normal speed until it hits another damaged fragment. It's somewhat reassuring because despite the slowness it does make progress eventually, rather than timing out or dying altogether!
The question is, if I never get a "file could not be read" error, and the hard drive just slows to a crawl when I hit bad patches, does this mean there is still hope for the drive? How is it possible I can pull data without some form of fatal error, if the surface is damaged?
I ran a scan on it with HDTune, which despite being a "quick" scan (usually takes about 1 minute), took over 10 hours, as it absolutely crawled each time it hit a red block:
When I've pulled the last file off it, I'll be writing zeros to it and doing another scan to see if it chokes at any point.
So what do you reckon ladies / gents... do I have a new paperweight or not?
So I have an old Western Digital 2TB drive which appears to be on its way out. All the signs, along with the scans I've managed to run on it, tell me it has bad sectors, but what intrigues me is that I am still able to pull files from it!... It just takes forever to do so. When it hits a bad spot it crawls down to like 200 KB/sec.
The files I am copying are quite large (video files, roughly 10GB each), and it's as if it slowly works its way through the "damaged fragments" and every now and then leaps forward at normal speed until it hits another damaged fragment. It's somewhat reassuring because despite the slowness it does make progress eventually, rather than timing out or dying altogether!
The question is, if I never get a "file could not be read" error, and the hard drive just slows to a crawl when I hit bad patches, does this mean there is still hope for the drive? How is it possible I can pull data without some form of fatal error, if the surface is damaged?
I ran a scan on it with HDTune, which despite being a "quick" scan (usually takes about 1 minute), took over 10 hours, as it absolutely crawled each time it hit a red block:
When I've pulled the last file off it, I'll be writing zeros to it and doing another scan to see if it chokes at any point.
So what do you reckon ladies / gents... do I have a new paperweight or not?
