All Questions
Tagged with hard-drive-failure hard-drive
146
questions
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.
...
- 613
31
votes
9
answers
10k
views
Hard Drive suddenly became unresponsive, recovered on reboot. What to do next?
So I have a desktop PC with an SSD and an HDD. Windows 10 is installed on the SSD, all my data is on the HDD. Today while I was playing a game, it suddenly became unresponsive. At the same time, the ...
- 609
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. ...
- 4,444
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 ...
- 269
12
votes
6
answers
2k
views
Is my hard disk failing?
I have a problem with my computer: I'm using Windows 7 x64, and when I try to acces the Downloads folder, it takes a long time. After waiting for half a minute or more, I can open it, see the contents,...
- 221
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 ...
- 759
9
votes
4
answers
3k
views
External USB hard drive and risk of internal condensation?
Apparently you can kill a USB hard drive by moving it from a cold to warm environment and powering it up. The killer being internal condensation.
Q1: How real is the risk? What kind of temperatures ...
- 11.4k
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 ...
- 1,967
7
votes
0
answers
3k
views
Reading data from a 23 year old IDE harddrive
I have a 200 MB Western Digital 2.5" IDE drive, originally from an Amiga 1200, that I would like to try to get an image file of, so I can keep the data that is on it.
Since the drive is very old, and ...
- 171
6
votes
1
answer
15k
views
How many drives can I safely lose in a RAID-10 array?
In a 4-drive RAID-10 setup, how many drives can I "safely" lose before the data becomes unrecoverable? It's a bit unclear to me whether the setup provides one drive or two drives worth of redundancy.
...
- 4,077
6
votes
2
answers
17k
views
Seatool's Short Generic test fails, but Long Generic test passes
I've got a new Seagate Expansion External hard drive, model STEB5000100 (5TB) from Amazon. It is connected to a computer via USB 3.0
Even though it is brand new I decided to run Seatools tests.
It ...
- 163
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 ...
- 153
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 ...
- 27.5k
4
votes
3
answers
8k
views
Windows detected a hard disk problem — 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 ...
- 39
4
votes
0
answers
211
views
Any way to tweak Windows' kernels or drives to handle I/O and reduce or eliminate hangs with failing drives?
I frequently work with failing hard drives for data recovery and various tasks. These tasks are usually short lived in nature, but important. The way Windows seems to handle any failing drive that's ...
- 1,231