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5TB Hard drive problem

Mav
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5TB Hard drive problem

A few weeks ago a 5TB Seagate harddrive stopped working. Seagate Drive Tools failed to run for this drive.

 

Today I have had another bash at checking things out. The drive is seen by Windows (10) and I have been able to navigate around a fair bit but with almost 3TB used and thousands of files in hundreds of folders I haven't checked every file.

 

Seagate Short and Long Tests failed but a Windows CHKDSK run from Tools after right clicking the drive icon reported no issues.

 

Is there a better way of finding out if there really are problems and, if so, possibly fixing them?

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4 REPLIES 4
ReedRichards
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Re: 5TB Hard drive problem

Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket!

I'm a great believer in the power of chkdsk - but running the full 5 stage version.  However it works the hard drive hard so if the drive is failing rapidly then chkdsk could make it worse.  

Seagate Drive Tools could, I suppose, check for idiosyncratic errors to which only Seagate drives are prone.  Have you looked for firmware updates?  That's a bit risky also.

If you find problems on a hard drive that have not been caused by a power failure then that usually means the drive is wearing out.  You might be able to fix the specific problems but the drive will still be wearing out.

  

 

ejs
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Re: 5TB Hard drive problem

I think the short and long tests are standard SMART tests, so you can look at the SMART data and see whichever values have exceeded the failure thresholds. In my experience, once the number of SMART reallocated sectors crosses the failure threshold, then the short and long tests don't really run, they just immediately return a failure result. I've got an old 1.5TB Seagate drive in that state, it only stopped reallocating sectors once it had almost ran out of spare sectors, but it continues to work about as well as it ever did (which is not very well, but it's an external drive, so its enclosure is probably half the trouble).

VileReynard
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Re: 5TB Hard drive problem

Is your disk readable?

I would take a backup of your data files immediately.

Seems a bit daft to trust a drive to NTFS with a constantly self-updating OS.
At least isolate your data on a RAID system with its own file-system.

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ReedRichards
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Re: 5TB Hard drive problem

Granted the NT in Windows NT is the same as the NT in NTFS but I think it's mistake to let any disaffection you have for Windows spill over into NTFS.  However, I have no quibbles with the advice to make immediate back-ups.