Hard drive death

[Mayneiac]

So today I noticed files (specifically music) weren't playing properly from my seagate barracuda 2TB HDD. Long story short, between Google and other forums I discovered my hard drive was getting "bad block" errors, which apparently means it's dying. So, I'm getting a new drive tomorrow before It dies completely and I have to attempt to recover everything.

 

what I was wondering was what are  your experiences with drives failing? This one is only 2 years old and is used more as a games/multimedia library, so it's in use only about half the time. It was a 40 C day today but it wasn't under heavy use. Is this normal? Is there any other contributing factors or is it normal for drives to suddenly begin to fail? Im really interested in what you guys have to say.

 

cheers 

[79wjd]

It's pretty normal and largely unpredictable. It's probably not even caused by anything you've done and just the drive itself deciding to take a shit. 

[sushisharkjl]

12 minutes ago, Mayneiac said:

So today I noticed files (specifically music) weren't playing properly from my seagate barracuda 2TB HDD. Long story short, between Google and other forums I discovered my hard drive was getting "bad block" errors, which apparently means it's dying. So, I'm getting a new drive tomorrow before It dies completely and I have to attempt to recover everything.

 

what I was wondering was what are  your experiences with drives failing? This one is only 2 years old and is used more as a games/multimedia library, so it's in use only about half the time. It was a 40 C day today but it wasn't under heavy use. Is this normal? Is there any other contributing factors or is it normal for drives to suddenly begin to fail? Im really interested in what you guys have to say.

 

cheers 

Mine crashed when an idiot classmate sat on my Thinkpad X201t whilst it was in Ubuntu, thus rendering the Thinkpad Shock Protection feature moot.

[Allshevski]

Google had an quite interesting study somewhere, showing how random HDD death is.. Temperature changes are the worst...

[YoFavRussian]

Well I can see that the time a drive dies varies a lot, I myself have a 1 TB seagate barracuda and that thing has yet to die even after about 5 years of service, every drive is random and can die at unexpected times.

 

Edit: I would say find a drive that is large enough to hold your files and move them to that drive, HDD's can fail at unexpecting times and as you said your drive is already going you should try to save as many files as possible.

[SuhDude]

Long time Lurker, first time commenting. This is normal behavior for modern hard drives, chances are they fail in the first Tb or so of use. If this drive was loaded with data and then just read from many times this is most likely the case. Best practice is when you get a new drive validate it by writing a bunch of data over the course of a few days. This way if it dies you can RMA it. I work in a datacenter so this is what most of my life consists of lol.

[Mayneiac]

34 minutes ago, SuhDude said:

If this drive was loaded with data and then just read from many times this is most likely the case. Best practice is when you get a new drive validate it by writing a bunch of data over the course of a few days. This way if it dies you can RMA it. I work in a datacenter so this is what most of my life consists of lol.

Rma it? It was, like I said, a 2 TB drive and it only had 300GB left on it. so could having a drive full cause it to fail as apposed to having it less than half full? And how do you recommend I copy my fleeting data over several days?

[SuhDude]

Apologies I think something got lost here. RMA is return merchandise authorization can normally only be done soon after you get a product if its faulty. Most of the time having your drive full will only effect its performance not cause it to die however they effectively have a small tornado happening inside them so strange stuff can happen. As for rescuing the data I would go through it and find the most important data and get that off first, then pull the not so important data. Also I would do this in smaller batches with time in between them as to limit the stress on the Hard drive. 

[79wjd]

13 minutes ago, Mayneiac said:

Rma it? It was, like I said, a 2 TB drive and it only had 300GB left on it. so could having a drive full cause it to fail as apposed to having it less than half full? And how do you recommend I copy my fleeting data over several days?

Even if it's half full it can still fail. I would copy your most important data first just to be safe, and then copy the rest (I would do it all at once -- the worst time for a drive is powering it up and down). More than likely you could run that drive and read/write from it for a few weeks straight and it will still probably be fine, so I wouldn't worry toooo much about how you're going to get your data off of it (although, don't obviously...). 

 

And he means to send it back to Seagate and have them send you a replacement (assuming it's still under warranty -- which it should be if it's <2 years old).