palliative harddrive care

[lusk]

As I briefly mentioned in another thread I ran into some trouble with my WD black 1tb drive, after struggeling to get my computer to recongize the drive I was finally able to rescue all semi-precious files. Got a chkdsk to run after lots of trouble, both computers I tested it in still refused to boot with the drive connected, so I resorted to writing zeroes to it with data lifeguard. And it appears to be working perfectly well again so. YAY.

 

 

 

 

So... I also found another old 1tb drive that I had forgotten about, this one a seagate barracuda. This one made a terrible whining noise and lots and lots of clicking. Could not get it to be detected anywhere regardless of what I tried. I bought it somewhere back in 2004 so warranty obviously gone. For shits and giggles I decided to open it and see if maybe there was something that could be done. At this point I was pretty sure the drive was beyond repair and I would damage it futher by opening it: here is the result, is it as bad as it looks? Cause this doesnt look right!

 

It looks like the head has run rampart and completely fucked up the disc, but what do I know

Tell me, is there any hope or is this a magnet & mirror now?

[Askew]

Platters are normally shiny all over, looks like head crash damage.

 

Heads aren't supposed to touch the platter, when they do this happens.

 

[Enderman]

Yup its dead.

[Guest Generallee]

SO SHINY

 

gotta love hdd platters

[lusk]

So the second disc is dead. The first one acted highly suspicious aswell. To give a short summary of what it did: got stuck on boot logo, made any computer unable to boot with it plugged in. Failed life guards quick&extended test. Showed about 20 damaged sectors in HD tune. Continued to do all of the former after a chkdsk. After writing zeroes to it its giving me no problems what so ever, but I havnt used it all that much yet.

 

Before all this, HD tunes benchmark showed a couple of read spikes, going as low as 3.7mb/s, it now shows a much more stable curve starting from 141 mb/s ending on 61.4 mb/s with no spikes bigger than about 20 mb/s. I can't remember the average speed but it looks to be about the same.

So from this, and the picture above. What is going on with the harddrive, is there anything I should keep an eye on? I would like to get some idea of life expectancy. Im not quite sure if the disc is failing horrible and will likly die any minute or if it just needed to be formatted. Hopefully there are some clues and I'm not asking you to go look into a crystal ball or anything.