Laptop SSHD died after two years - insane HD Sentinel readouts - any ideas?

[specialistHUN]

Hello everybody,

 

a friend of mine has an Asus gamer laptop (i7 + 1050Ti) which he bought a little over two years ago. The laptop's storage solution is a 256GB m.2 SATA SSD and a 1 TB 2.5" SSHD. Today he approached me with a problem that mid-game, his game crashed and his whole system locked up. Eventually he managed to close the game, only to realize that his entire Drive D was missing from Windows, and most of his apps weren't working. A reboot managed to fix the problem but his laptop is acting weird ever since, and now that he's paying more attention to the laptop, he can hear that the drive is making some weird noises when spinning. 

 

I assumed from the get-go that his SSHD might be failing. I had him download HD Sentinel to have a look at his drive condition and as the attached image shows, according to the app, that thing is barely clinging on to life. Obviously I immediately recommended him to start saving all his important files to pen-drive. Naturally, the laptop's warranty expired in November last year.

What I don't understand is the number of starts / shutdowns of that SSHD. Apologies for the UI being in Hungarian but I believe you can get all the data regardless. The app shows that in 268 days of operation, that thing was powered on / off 65535 times which is insane and (if the data is correct) it could've caused such degradation. What could've caused this? Did a controller or something die?
For comparison, my 5 years old WD HDD's start / stop count was 2828 in 889 days of operation and it still has 100% condition according to HD Sentinel.

 

Did anybody see anything like this? Does this seem abnormal only to me? Do Seagate's SSHD's die this fast? Is maybe HD Sentinel's data wrong (never had issues with that app before though)? What I'm worried about is that if something's wrong with the laptop, then even if we get a new drive, it might kill it with time.

 

Any ideas / experiences are much appreciated!

Cheers,
specialist

[Mling]

laptops powerdown drives to save power. This I guess is why you get a lot of on/off cycles. A SSHD would have higher use if you think about it, all that writing data to/from the SSD and the HD. I've been told SSHD are crap and should be avoided by a friend that works at a computer store.

[Radium_Angel]

What @Mling said.

The power cycle could easily be from a standard power setting of "turn off HDD after x minutes of disuse"

 

[NTDaws]

Most laptops have a power savings feature to shut down drives that aren't in use. I recommend replacing the drive and disabling the feature.

[specialistHUN]

Thank you all for the input!
However, I believe that 65k on/off cycles are still too high for 2 years of operation. His default settings were 10 mins off battery and 20 when plugged in.
I've just checked the settings on my desktop and this feature is also enabled for me (and I assume it has been for years) yet I have much lower on/off cycles. Since September last year I got a second SSD so at the moment I'm only using my HDD for mass storage, no apps, which means that I don't use it that often. I'll keep an eye on my HDD to see at what speed my cycles increase now that my HDD is used less frequently.

 

I told my friend to increase that value to something much higher in the meantime and we'll look up probably a 1TB SSD to replace this dying piece.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

an SSHD is not special. it's just a harddrive. if that laptop was dropped or it got a hard knock or whatever then that's enough to kill the drive. it's not seagate SSHD's dying fast or anythign it's hdd's in general. 

[Heliian]

The drive is bad, could have been bad from day one.  Time for a new drive, go with an SSD fo sho.  All that red on the monitor page means the drive is toast.

[Archer42]

Honestly 65535 looks suspiciously special (2^16-1), most likely not actual number of power cycles but software error.

It would be nice to see a screenshot of actual smart, and not this useless "conclusions".

 

Also getting all the data intact from this will be lucky event. And IMO the issue, most likely, is physical damage. Slightest bump when operating can cause serious damage to hdd, which can cause it to degrade quickly too. And that's very likely in a laptop.

 

1 hour ago, President Dawson Wehage said:

I recommend replacing the drive and disabling the feature.

Terrible idea. This "power saving" also protects hdd from physical damage. If r/w heads are parked most of the time any physical impacts are far less likely to cause harm, because no damage will happen if the heads are parked when it happens. Disable the feature and hdd will die in few weeks of regular laptop use.

[specialistHUN]

11 hours ago, Archer42 said:

Honestly 65535 looks suspiciously special (2^16-1), most likely not actual number of power cycles but software error.

It would be nice to see a screenshot of actual smart, and not this useless "conclusions".

 

Also getting all the data intact from this will be lucky event. And IMO the issue, most likely, is physical damage. Slightest bump when operating can cause serious damage to hdd, which can cause it to degrade quickly too. And that's very likely in a laptop.

 

Terrible idea. This "power saving" also protects hdd from physical damage. If r/w heads are parked most of the time any physical impacts are far less likely to cause harm, because no damage will happen if the heads are parked when it happens. Disable the feature and hdd will die in few weeks of regular laptop use.

Had him take a screenshot.
He also noted that the power on / off cycles didn't change since yesterday so I suspect something might off there.

For reference, I checked my laptop which shows 12985 cycles in 165 days, his brother's shows 132010 in 2 years. Maybe laptop hard drives are just this special...

He saved about 40GB worth of personal data yesterday, all seems to be intact, he didn't notice anything missing or getting corrupted.

 

As for physical damage, I'm unsure. He doesn't remember any major bump or anything like that, he mostly uses his laptop at home. I know that last year one of his fans died but that got replaced immediately so I doubt a possible overheating could've caused it.

[specialistHUN]

Well, to anybody still listening here: we double-checked the saved data and everything is fine, no corruption, after this, my friend threw out this faulty SSHD and got himself a 1TB 3D NAND SSD, so he's set up quite nicely now.

Thank you everyone for the input.