Failing Hard Drive?

[GazzaMataz]

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.

 

[GazzaMataz]

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]

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?