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48 votes
3 answers
84k views

What do the current, worst, and threshold SMART values mean?

I have a 2TB internal hard drive that might be failing. It spends several minutes at 100% usage when I first turn it on since I installed Windows 10, and yesterday it reported a corrupted Recycle Bin. ...
Celarix's user avatar
  • 613
11 votes
4 answers
12k views

Mean Time to Failure (MTTF): When disk manufacturers post this, how should you interpret their numbers?

Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) is usually given in terms of hours, and by doing some calculations, it seems that a disk should fail only after a good number of years have gone by. It seems that disks ...
Kaitlyn Mcmordie's user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
10k views

My harddrive failed SMART check and short drive self test. What should I do?

I used SeaTools for Windows to test my harddrive and i failed the S.M.A.R.T check and Short Drive Self Test. What's wrong with my hard drive? Is it a big problem? Do I need to do anything to solve ...
Pacerier's user avatar
  • 27.5k
3 votes
1 answer
26k views

SSD stopped working suddenly. Any chance of data recovery?

I have been using a Corsair Force 3 (120GB) SSD since last 1.5 years. Yesterday, the laptop freezed suddenly and I had to hard reset it. Then it refused to boot as if no HDD was installed. This has ...
Madhur's user avatar
  • 115
16 votes
5 answers
10k views

How to prolong the life of an external hard drive?

In ten years, across several different machines, different companies, and different operating systems I've noticed a trend that external hard drives die long before their internal counterparts. ...
Django Reinhardt's user avatar
13 votes
3 answers
6k views

Why do SSDs tend to fail much more suddenly than HDDs?

Modern PCs tend to use one of two types of internal-storage devices:1 2 Hard-disk drives (HDDs) store data on spinning disks coated in a magnetic recording medium, a technology dating back to the ...
Vikki's user avatar
  • 269
7 votes
3 answers
17k views

What is the fastest way to force hdd to reallocate bad sectors and discard the data?

I either own or am in charge of (at work) a lot of HDDs that are either part of raid arrays, or there are backups of the data elsewhere. When a disk is starting to fail and going slow because it's ...
BeowulfNode42's user avatar
5 votes
1 answer
11k views

Whole working Windows 7 partition (on SSD) suddenly became "Unallocated Disk Space"

I have an HP 2540p with Windows 7 installed on a Plextor M3 SSD that sits in the upgrade drive bay (that used to house a DVD drive). The system has been working fine for months until this morning when ...
Pawin's user avatar
  • 153
4 votes
3 answers
8k views

Windows detected a hard disk p⁣roblem — what should I do?

I'm using Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, I'm getting windows error popups like this one for about 3 days, multiple times a day: This Samsung SpinPoint F3 HD502HJ 500 GB is about 2 years old and I already ...
bart's user avatar
  • 39
3 votes
1 answer
3k views

Recovering data from failing hard-drive using ddrescue

Lately my hard-drive have failed me. I'm trying to rescue some important data from it and right now im stuck doing this... I've read about ddrescue data recovery tool and it seems like it's doing its ...
rosko's user avatar
  • 131
2 votes
2 answers
940 views

Is it true that a hard drive need to be used once in a while to stay alive?

I have heard someone saying that someone else said hard-disks need to be "moved" once in a while, meaning it has to spin or data has to read or written to once in a while or something like that. I am ...
Wayne's World's user avatar
1 vote
2 answers
906 views

How should I store a spare HDD for maximum lifetime, when the disks in use may not fail for years?

I've got about 12 large enterprise (5 yr warranty) HDDs across 3 computers. Their current ages are 4 disks @ 2-3 years and the rest 3-6 months, so they're all past their 3 month burn-in and no SMART ...
Stilez's user avatar
  • 1,745
1 vote
0 answers
2k views

Difference between bad block, bad sector and bad cluster? repairing

So recently my system (win7 64) started running strange. Open file dialog broken, random service crashes, . Throughout the day the system was getting less and less stable until continuous blue screens ...
Tom G11's user avatar
  • 387
0 votes
1 answer
9k views

Can the $BadClus file hold recoverable data?

I have an external hard drive that a family member dropped but however still functions perfectly other than the drive is not partitioned; the drive doesn't even click in the way a normal damaged hard ...
AStopher's user avatar
  • 2,363
0 votes
0 answers
103 views

Blank screen before Windows login screen - is my SSD about to die?

I'm running a Windows 7 system with an ASRock H61M-HVS motherboard which boots from a 128GB Kingston SV200 SSD. The drive has been in use in this capacity since 2010, and until recently has had fast ...
Hashim Aziz's user avatar
  • 13.1k

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