Failing Hard Drive?

GazzaMataz · 2 Jun 2019 at 00:10

OK I have noticed in the last few weeks that my reasonbly new PC (build Nov 2018) has shown a tendancy to stick occasionally. It uses an M2 512 SSD for Windows and an HDD for data. The PC was working fine yesterday and this evening I turned the machine on and it looked like the whole of the HDD was gone.

So I ran Chksdk and it said it needed repairs but couldn't do them. So I rebooted the machine and then the files seemed to have returned and Chkdsk said the drive needed to be repaired. The drive is a Seagate Barracuda which is over five years old so now I am wondering if it is failing. If so what software should I run to check it? Normally if I suspect a failing drive I replace it. My logic is you can replace computer parts but never your data and that is more precious.

What is really annoying is that I am at the end of a job and need my files so I am worried about continuing to use the drive to finish the project even though it now says the drive is OK. And I do have a backup :-)

This is a bit of a new/weirdone on me since I have never seen this behaviour before.

cyber69 · 2 Jun 2019 at 00:23

Download Seatools from Seagate website and run that. Wddiags also work.

EsaT · 2 Jun 2019 at 09:47

First thing to do is taking backup of anything important.
It might fail completely at any moment...
(or something else in computer)

Also would be good to check that cables are firmly attached.

Event Viewer and Reliability Monitor could give hints, if its drive which has caused those hiccups.

GazzaMataz · 3 Jun 2019 at 14:32

Thanks for the replies chaps!

I downloaded and ran SeaTools and low and behold I had a dodgy drive! New one ordered as replacement and I backed-up my back-up! The failing drive was about 7-8 eight years old and had 14,526 Power-On Hours and 16,452.76 TB/yr clocked up…

GazzaMataz · 12 Jun 2019 at 09:20

OK now I have replaced my old drive with a new one and am copying files across from it. This started fine with fast transfer speeds 100MB/s and upwards and then seems to crawl down to KB/s… I know the drive might be damaged but I would have thought that in that case it wouldn't be able to transfer files at all. So I changed the SATA cable but no difference. I do find that the initial transfer speeds are high then drop right off to tortoise levels. It seems that I am geting this when copying from good drive to other good drives too so I am wondering if the dodgy drive is affecting the whole SATA bus? Anyone got any ideas?