Is my HDD about to die?

[silkstone]

Hi, I was wondering if i could get your guys' opinions?

I restarted my computer this morning and it loaded up extremely sluggishly. No errors, and it did load eventually (about 5 minutes). Most programs are able to open, apart from (annoyingly) chrome. I just tried to do a disk scan on my drive but it was taking forever. After about 20 minutes it had got through about 5% of the sectors, so i started up HD Tune and ran a benchmark. For the first 50mb the read speed was 100kb/s before jumping back up to around 150mb/s.

At around 250gb i got a disk read error from HD Tune, But smart only gives a warning about current pending sectors.

I have my drive partitioned as a boot partition and a secondary one that i use for torrents. I'm running a scan of the second partition now to see if i can find anything and i will run one on the primary sector overnight as i am assuming it will take a good few hours.

Have any of you experienced problems like this before? Any ideas what could be happening?

Thanks.

[Sasqui]

Originally Posted by silkstone

At around 250gb i got a disk read error from HD Tune, But smart only gives a warning about current pending sectors.

I think you've already answered your own question. Back up any data, and check WD site for your warrantee status (you enter the serial number).

Also, try testing the drive with a different cable and sata plug (assuming you can).

[silkstone]

Yea, i ran Check Disk overnight and woke up to a new SMART error (01 Raw read error).

I'm going to load the dos tools and see if it can be fixed, if not i hope i can still rma it.

[animal007uk]

Originally Posted by silkstone

Yea, i ran Check Disk overnight and woke up to a new SMART error (01 Raw read error).

I'm going to load the dos tools and see if it can be fixed, if not i hope i can still rma it.

Backup your data first because you could end up with a fully dead drive while trying to fix it.

[gopal]

Backup your data first then do anything

[RejZoR]

Install Crystal Disk Info on it. I run this app on all my systems in real-time so if anything comes up i know i have to take care of the data. So far it saved my data once when Samsung HDD was going wonky on me...

[Mathragh]

Aye, first things first, Back up your data!!. You probably cannot retrieve it all anymore at the moment, so dont waste precious time trying to fix it while even more sectors go bad and you loose even more data.

After you backed up its probably best to RMA it. Had the same with a HDD in a brand new laptop a year ago. Just sent it back and they put a new one in. If it stil has warranty you'll have no trouble getting a new one.

[HTC]

After you backup you HDD, get this program: HDD Sentinel.

Click on the button signaled with the red arrow (1st pic) and then hit "Start Test" (2nd pic).

[silkstone]

Well, i picked up a 120gb ssd to replace the dying samsung and moved a bit of data across (mainly game saves).

While trying to 'fix'the samsung, it died, read errors, unformattable, even spinrite can't fix it (unrecoverable read errors). It looks like the bad sectors got so numerous that there was none left to reallocate

I would love to fix it and use it as a drive to put non-essential data on, but i am out of ideas and i think it's prolly gotta go to the scrap heap. It had a 3yr warranty and is out of warranty by about 40days so no replacement for me.

I'm pretty sure it was down to heavy torrent usage, i'm looking at seeing if i can set up uTorrent to have a 1-2gb cache and then have it dump the data to my 2tb drive every hour or so to reduce wear, either that or i buy another 8gb of ram and set up a ram disk for torrents.

Any suggestions?

[HTC]

Originally Posted by silkstone

Well, i picked up a 120gb ssd to replace the dying samsung and moved a bit of data across (mainly game saves).

While trying to 'fix'the samsung, it died, read errors, unformattable, even spinrite can't fix it (unrecoverable read errors). It looks like the bad sectors got so numerous that there was none left to reallocate

I would love to fix it and use it as a drive to put non-essential data on, but i am out of ideas and i think it's prolly gotta go to the scrap heap. It had a 3yr warranty and is out of warranty by about 40days so no replacement for me.

I'm pretty sure it was down to heavy torrent usage, i'm looking at seeing if i can set up uTorrent to have a 1-2gb cache and then have it dump the data to my 2tb drive every hour or so to reduce wear, either that or i buy another 8gb of ram and set up a ram disk for torrents.

Any suggestions?

That crap happened to me with my 100 contos (500 euros) graphic card: about 1 week after the warranty had ended, it got video RAM corruption ...

As for your SSD problem, again with the same program as before: see attach.

The problem is that i dunno if you can do this with the trial version (as you can see from my 1st response in your topic, i have the full version).

Another (potential) problem is that this thing is for HDDs: dunno if this works for SSDs.

EDIT

Wait a minute: what drive is your dying samsung? It's not on your system specs: is it a HDD or a SSD?

[silkstone]

Originally Posted by HTC

That crap happened to me with my 100 contos (500 euros) graphic card: about 1 week after the warranty had ended, it got video RAM corruption ...

As for your SSD problem, again with the same program as before: see attach.

The problem is that i dunno if you can do this with the trial version (as you can see from my 1st response in your topic, i have the full version).

Another (potential) problem is that this thing is for HDDs: dunno if this works for SSDs.

EDIT

Wait a minute: what drive is your dying samsung? It's not on your system specs: is it a HDD or a SSD?

Yea, the drive that died is my samsung. I updated my profile yesterday with my new SSD

[Sasqui]

Originally Posted by silkstone

While trying to 'fix'the samsung, it died, read errors, unformattable, even spinrite can't fix it (unrecoverable read errors). It looks like the bad sectors got so numerous that there was none left to reallocate

Sounds like a head crash... once the read heads start to physically grind into the disk, it's a cascade of self destruction. You should see the IBM drive I had from 2002 or so, the inner ring of the top platter is ground down pretty bad. Makes a good conversation peice. There's black magnetic dust still all over the inside (what's left of the operating system, lol)

Sounds like you don't have much to lose, take the screws off and peek inside?