1TB hard drive died :(

[Mussels]

So my first samsung drive to ever die, is happening right now. I'm kinda bored watching it transfer files at 300KB/s, so i thought i'd post up my experience and 'solutions' here to help people out if they end up in the same boat.


How it started:
Turned on my E-sata cage, and heard a funny noise. sounded like a duller, quieter version of capacitor whine. Or say, the whine a raptor makes.
Current face:

The next step:
I went to copy files to it. They were chugging along at a massive 300KB/s.
Current face:

Then the PC started freezing. pausing, stuttering etc.
Current face

I turned off the E-sata cage to see wtf was wrong with my PC, and the problem went away. realised my drive was possibly screwed.
Current face:

So i cleared some room off my other drives, and started backing up data. The pauses got more and more severe, to the point my display driver was crashing, and explorer would lock up. Chance of file recovery at this rate: zero.
Current face:

At this point, i figured i may as well wipe out any and all possibilities here. I connected the hard drive up to another machine (my media PC) and shared the drive remotely. Same issues. still
Then i tried teracopy pro. While the programs buggy and outdated, it has one massive benefit: when it crashes, it doesnt take explorer with it... and it shows me the file name of the one that crashed .
Current face:

Where i'm at currently, is watching teracopy pro take the files from my HDD over the network to the other drives in my E-sata cage, at speeds that vary from 12KB/s to 85MB/s.
So far ive lost about 2GB of 900GB that was on there, with about 400GB backd up.
Current mood:

Out comes the bundy and coke while i watch this slooooowly copy.

 

[kyle2020]

Christ, I bet your glad you caught it so early on! Imagine if you had music on quite loud or the TV, and hadnt have heard it!

Well, have fun sitting and watching the bar creep up, and well done catching the problem so fast

 

[Mussels]

theres a good reason i like silent PC's if you ever hear em, you know somethings wrong.

Thankfully it seems only the most recent files added to the drive are faulty, and since most of them were downloaded recently i can still get them again (as i know where i got them from, and still have links)

I coulda lost 1TB of anime here almost a ghastly crisis that would have sent the anime nation thread into mourning.

 

[kyle2020]

Yeah, thats what I go by - I keep it as silent as possible, if anything sounds strange, youve got a problem

1TB of anime down the drain . . . that would have stung.

 

[Mussels]

Yeah, thats what I go by - I keep it as silent as possible, if anything sounds strange, youve got a problem

1TB of anime down the drain . . . that would have stung.

the only reason i'm not really sad about this, is that the drives still in warranty and i havent lost any real data weeeee. (This happy period COULD be related to the rum)

 

[MRCL]

Teracopy pro hm? I could've used that a year ago when the exact same thing happened to a Hitachi drive of mine. Only difference, I lost every single file on it. All the music and movie files AWAY, except for the few that I had on my mp3 player. THAT was the day I started saving everything twice or trice.

Good thing you can save some stuff man.

 

[kyle2020]

It just strikes me as strange that a samsung drive would fail . . . I always credited them as being super reliable - I hope my spinpoint doesnt go and kick the bucket now.

 

[Mussels]

It just strikes me as strange that a samsung drive would fail . . . I always credited them as being super reliable - I hope my spinpoint doesnt go and kick the bucket now.

its the first samsung thats failed on me. hasnt been abused or anything.

i ran a chkdsk on it and it found bad sectors, so i guess i got the unlucky, faulty drive that takes a few months to die. Typical really, as this was one of only two drives i didnt do my normal "abuse the hell out of new stuff to see if its gunna break" routine to

 

[Geofrancis]

i lost a 500gb hitachi deathstar a few months ago but it only took 2 weeks to fill it again with a 20mb cable connection

 

[Mussels]

in the end i only lost about 2GB of data, and i have a list with each files name. i was up til 6am because of it

 

[MopeyMartian]

Any hard drive can fail at any time and can last 2 seconds or 2 decades. backup, backup, backup

 

[El Fiendo]

If you haven't tossed it, seal it in a bag and freeze it. This can buy you an extra 5-15 minutes per freezing though it only really works once or twice.. The only thing is that it solves mechanical failure not circuit board failure. Basically it contracts the mechanical parts back into their correct place as the temperature lowers. If you can find a way to run it while in the freezer, all the better.

I've done this and it does work. Just need to be quick. Depends on how much you want that 2 gigs.

 

[DOM]

in the end i only lost about 2GB of data, and i have a list with each files name. i was up til 6am because of it

how full was it ? DaMulta told me if you fill it up to where it has 10-15% left it dies

 

[Mussels]

it was about 10-15% off being full. Then again my other four have 1-2% free, and they're fine.

 

[Easo]

My 750GB version is at least cheap... Hell, even 1 TB is kinda cheap. If it would die, i would mourn files mostly. But it doesnt look like its going to die in nearest 2 years (i hope :d).

 

[thebeephaha]

It just strikes me as strange that a samsung drive would fail . . .

Any drive can fail.

Sometimes it's a bad batch, sometimes it is just a random fluke due to bad Q/C or shipping, sometimes it happens for no apparent reason.

Companies go through phases, like the Seagate 7200.10s were for the most part rock solid for quite some time and then now the .11s were like a plague and quickly phased out for the new .12s.

Remember the IBM/Hitachi fiasco? There was a lot of bad blood from those days but now those drives are for the most part as good as any other.

 

[Mussels]

it is an external drive (in my esata cage), so while its safe and secure at home, its possible it took some vibration damage going to/from a lan. its odd, if one failed you'd expect the rest to... but hey, i dont mind as i lost no data.

 

[allen337]

You gonna try to low level format it or just RMA?

 

[Mussels]

You gonna try to low level format it or just RMA?

already sent it back. bad clusters were found in the checkdisk, and there's no way i'm keeping a drive with physical damage, if its in warranty.

 

[allen337]

I agree

 

[hat]

Meh, forget multiple small hard drives... I would get two big hard drives and mirror them like the 2TB western digital drives. If 2TB isn't enough, I would get 4 and do RAID 0+1. If 4TB isn't enough... then I guess it's 6 drives... of corse this meathod can get a little expensive, but it's very simple.

 

[twilyth]

Remember the IBM/Hitachi fiasco? There was a lot of bad blood from those days but now those drives are for the most part as good as any other.

I had about 8 of those 100-120gig drives. In a couple cases I was able to transplant the circuit boards from one to another and recover the data, but man was that a fuckin' nightmare. I still hate Hitachi.

 

[CAPITAL LETTERS]

wow lucky you, got it just in time.

i have a WD 500gb that i didnt know was failing untill too late, heres what happened:

i got back into my room (after what i assume was a long time on 'hdd failing')
i sat down on my pc chair had one bight of my doughnut and took a quick glance over at my pc, for some reason i count see through the window of it at all (current face: ) then i realised what it was, it was the smoke that comes out of a broken silicon chip that still has a 12v power supply to it. current face now:

at first i have no idea what component the silicon smoke was coming from.
i was panicking something fierce. i had thought it was my new mobo i just installed the day before.
i then immediately reached for the power cord and yanked it out.

after about 20 minutes of sniffing through all the components looking for what had the rich smell of the Smokey silicon, i had come to realize it was one on my hdd's, the pcb on the hdd was completely black (its a wonder why i didnt see that in the first place but oh well).

knowing it was my hdd, i hooked it up to a seperate power supply just by itself and sure enough, it started to smoke. current face:

its a shame too, the hdd that failed had ALL my music on it. now think of this, im a DJ at the local club and my music collection is literally in smoke.
i had to download as much music as i could that wasnt on a cd just so i could still get paid for that night's worth of DJ'ing....i got capped....sad face

 

[thebeephaha]

Meh, forget multiple small hard drives... I would get two big hard drives and mirror them like the 2TB western digital drives. If 2TB isn't enough, I would get 4 and do RAID 0+1. If 4TB isn't enough... then I guess it's 6 drives... of corse this meathod can get a little expensive, but it's very simple.

So inefficient to do RAID1, parity data FTW.