Hard drive dying??

[spoony77]

Hi people
I've had issues recently with my windows install slowing to a halt and stalling with all explorer tasks so I reinstalled windows.
On reconnecting all my other hard drives I found one that is taking ages to access and think this is maybe the culprit of the original slowdowns as I had all my game installs on this drive.
I ran a chckdisk on the drive and it returned no errors so I took it out and put it in an external caddie and it still seems flaky with lots of reconnects and stalls as I try to save some of the data on there...
So how can I properly test if its faulty and how can I save the data - particularly game saves....as like I said transferring whilst in the caddie is going at a painful 20-100kb/s!!!
Any advice appreciated.

 

[BaroUK2]

You can test with utilities such as HD Tune, HD Tach, HDD Scan, G Smart Control, Windows Drive Fitness Test and manufacturer specific test utilities such Maxtor, Seagate, Samsung and so on.

Is the drive fragmented ? Did you try with another SATA cable?

 

[spoony77]

Hi I haven't tried with another cable no - I didn't know cables could fail but I will try that.
Its a WD black so I didn't expect it to fail as they are well regarded and I didn't think defragging was still a thing but will give it a go thanks for the advice

 

[bledd]

In future, run backups of your drives.

With backups, you can simply RMA a drive and fit a new one in it's place and restore to it. Zero data loss, zero stress.