Is my hdd dead?

[SimoneP]

So one of my HDD's is a Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB. I bought it about 5 years ago and used it mainly to store games and series.

I was watching an episode of a serie today, which was located on that HDD. Multiple times during the episode it freezes and I see some sort of artifacts, this happens fairly often when I watch series that are located on that drive, I just thought that the HDD was slow. Games located on that drive do work correctly though. But while watching the episode, it suddenly froze and nothing happened for about a minute, then I got some sort of error and my drive was nowhere to be seen in the explorer. I opened the BIOS and I couldn't see it there either. So can I assume that my HDD is dead and that I should buy a new one? Luckily nothing important was on that drive.

[Levent]

yeah sounds like it, I would try a different sata port just in case though.

[Silentprototipe]

Is it making any clicking noises? What about SMART? If it was failing it would have warned you by now

[NelizMastr]

27 minutes ago, silentprototipe said:

Is it making any clicking noises? What about SMART? If it was failing it would have warned you by now

As soon as Windows starts warning you about the drive health, it's usually too late already hah  

 

And active SMART monitoring is disabled in the BIOS by default for some reason, which doesn't make it easier to keep track. 

[SimoneP]

I opened up my case, fiddled a bit with the sata cable on that drive and now the drive is working again. Still I kind of feel like the HDD is dying. There are no weird sounds though. I downloaded CrystalDiskInfo and it shows up as a good drive. https://imgur.com/a/LBgm6

[Silentprototipe]

13 minutes ago, NelizMastr said:

As soon as Windows starts warning you about the drive health, it's usually too late already hah  

 

And active SMART monitoring is disabled in the BIOS by default for some reason, which doesn't make it easier to keep track. 

Huh, Not for me lol. When windows warned me I still had time to buy a new HDD and move over my data and it still works 

[NelizMastr]

Just now, silentprototipe said:

Huh, Not for me lol. When windows warned me I still had time to buy a new HDD and move over my data and it still works 

You got lucky then  I've had a few instances where backing up the drive killed it halfway through. The last stress that made it go belly up  

14 minutes ago, SimoneP said:

I opened up my case, fiddled a bit with the sata cable on that drive and now the drive is working again. Still I kind of feel like the HDD is dying. There are no weird sounds though. I downloaded CrystalDiskInfo and it shows up as a good drive. https://imgur.com/a/LBgm6

Yep, looks good. Could've genuinely been just a loose connection. Keep an eye on the SMART status once in a while.

[seagate_surfer]

Glad to hear it worked out, you may want to try a different SATA cable and see if that helps, where the issue seems to be somewhere in the connection.

You can also download our free diagnostic software SeaTools to actively monitor your drives' health if you like.

[SimoneP]

Is it normal that both of my hdd's are SATA 3gb/s instead of 6 gb/s? I'm assuming they aren't able to use 6gb/s because they're old. I have 4 sata 6gb/s ports and they are all in there but only my SSD shows up as 6gb/s. https://imgur.com/a/x2wZp

[seagate_surfer]

41 minutes ago, SimoneP said:

Is it normal that both of my hdd's are SATA 3gb/s instead of 6 gb/s? I'm assuming they aren't able to use 6gb/s because they're old. I have 4 sata 6gb/s ports and they are all in there but only my SSD shows up as 6gb/s. https://imgur.com/a/x2wZp

It's normal for hard drives that were made during a certain time period when SATA II (SATA with 3.0Gb/s interface) was the widely used standard, before SATA III (6.0 Gb/s interface) came along and became popular. Drives that are SATA II interface will work in SATA III ports, but will be limited to the capabilities/speeds of SATA II.

It is important to note that the SATA version speeds are theoretical speeds, and while SSDs performance can meet them quite well, it's been said that HDDs don't tend to fully saturate the theoretical capabilities of the port, so you likely wouldn't notice an extreme difference in performance when it comes to using a HDD as far as whether the port is SATA II or III.

[SimoneP]

Thanks for the explanation, I figured as much.

 

I tried to run some tests with HD Tune and it shows two warnings in the health section, I have no idea if that's anything to be concerned about: https://imgur.com/a/M1pAi

I also added a screenshot of the read test, and it seems to be fine I guess, although it sometimes dips down a bit for a moment.