Is my HDD dead??

VaishakhImpossible · August 30, 2018

I have a Seagate ST2000DM001 from the past 8 Years. It is giving me problem from yesterday.

I had 3 partitions on the HDD. 150GiB for the OS, Office etc. 150GiB for Setup files of Solidworks, MATLAB......Windows ISO files.....etc. Essentially all applications I use.

The 3rd partition had everything else. Game setup files, Game Installed files, Photoshop Installed files etc...., 500GiB of Movies, TV series, 300GiB of Anime, Songs, All Pics from cameras and Phones etc.

Whenever the OS ran into a problem I used to format the OS partition and reinstall Windows, Delete all installed files in the 1.5TiB partition and reinstall all games and applications I use.

This had been going on for 8 years now. I added a 1TiB HDD 2 years ago. In FEB 2018, I started experiencing delayed response and Movies playing choppy on VLC. It didn't change with even a fresh install of Windows.

I had some saved cash and bought a Samsung 250GiB 850 EVO. After installing Windows on that and using it as a boot drive, everything was normal till yesterday.

When I booted my PC yesterday, it didn't boot. It prompted me to repair Windows and I did. And Windows had uninstalled tons of software and games in the process. So I decided to do a fresh install. But, the Windows USB DVD Download tool was throwing a I/O device error. When I tried browsing the location of file manually, it took 5 minutes to open the containing folder. Everything in that HDD was as slow. All 3 partitions.

I somehow copied the Windows ISO file to the other HDD. The transfer rate was around 500KB/s. Write speed from SSD to 1TiB HDD was 170MB/s. I copied the important data from The 2TiB HDD to where ever possible, Wiped the 2TiB HDD clean and made 2 new equal partitions. Did a clean install of Windows on the SSD.

Now, I wanted the files back as they were earlier. I copied all the backed up data to the 2TiB HDD. But its still not working as it should. Videos gets stuck during playback from the 2TiB HDD but plays smoothly on the 1TiB HDD. When copying files, initially the write speed will be good but drops to zero half way and somehow completes( checked for multiple size files and numerous small files). If I play a song the task manager shows the 2TiB HDD at 100% and the song gets stuck at least 10 times during playback. But for the same song, the other HDD is at 0-2% but plays smoothly. On Groove Music, VLC and iTunes.

I tried copying songs back and forth between HDDs to see if there is data loss(50GiB of songs) but it appears as if its just playback issue. Crystal Disk Mark shows similar numbers for both HDDs and even the Seatool says that both HDDs passed all tests with 100% but I can see the difference.

So, is my HDD dead? can I make it work like b4?