Which of my hard drives are most likely to fail?

Hard Drive Test results, all so different:

There are no words to describe this. Its a mess. All 4 software give me different results. You can tell third party are more alighned but they saying something different from manufactures own software. Who to believe?

My windows is unresponsive and been acting weird lately, its on SSD drive. My storage HDD is on the D drive and its noisy as hell to. Add to that, my usb flash drive stopped getting recognized. All this happened on same week.

Altoban

Posted 2017-04-24T21:50:30.240

Reputation: 121

"There are no words to describe this." "Its a mess". I don't know, those sound like words to me. :-) – fixer1234 – 2017-04-24T22:10:52.883

The only tool that Seagate will care about, and will based your warranty claim on, is their tool. Any other tool won't be recognize by them as being valid for the purposes of a warranty claim. – Ramhound – 2017-04-24T22:23:53.497

so is their tool reliable? Should i keep using the drive? I dont think seagate cares about my data, just that i give them a really dead drive. – Altoban – 2017-04-24T22:41:59.297

I will not comment on the quality of their tool. I just know that from personal experience, you will have to provide them logs from their tool which shows it failed generated by their tool, in order to get it replaced by their warranty period (if its even eligible based on when you purchased it is up to you to determine). If the drive has been running for longer than the warranty ( i.e. 2 years or whatever it is) then it doesn't matter what their tool says. You will also have to supply them the purchase date I believe. – Ramhound – 2017-04-24T22:49:12.457

both are 4 year old drives. Did it fail the test and yet you could still sort of read whats on the drive? – Altoban – 2017-04-24T22:56:30.187

Answers

Everything you are seeing is related - The S.M.A.R.T values are correct and are simply being interpreted differently.

Your hard drive is running OK, but is getting to the end of its life, and needs to be replaced. (If your drive is under Warranty Seagate may or may not not replace it - as the drive has not yet failed).

Your SSD is suffering from similar issues and should likewise should ideally be replaced. That said, you might just want to keep an eye on it and see if the problem gets worse.

The issues with your USB drives are probably unrelated, but you might want to re-evaluate the quality of your power supply and/or get a decent UPS.

davidgo

Posted 2017-04-24T21:50:30.240

Reputation: 49 152

Which one would you say is more prone to failing? I cant replace both at the same time. – Altoban – 2017-04-24T22:20:56.663

1Better question is always "What data can I not afford to lose?" Disks are always cheaper than emergencies after a failure – Christopher Hostage – 2017-04-24T22:23:02.683

@Altoban - You should replace whichever drive has the 13,728 bad sectors which also detected 126 errors during a data transfer. Your Seagate HDD, health might be poor, but the purposes of a warranty has not failed yet. In order to do a warranty claim through Seagate it must fail using their tool. Your SSD is 2 years old, and it already has retired blocks, you should keep track of that. – Ramhound – 2017-04-24T22:34:02.583

the 13728 reported are for seagate HDD drive – Altoban – 2017-04-24T22:35:35.850

@Altoban - Both drives are going to fail at some point. Bear in mind that when hard drives fail they tend to allow some data recovery, but SSDs typically fail catastrophically without warning. If I were cash strapped I'd buy a new hard drive, using the SSD for programs and make sure data is saved to the new hard drive. – davidgo – 2017-04-25T00:22:42.483

For the most accurate S.M.A.R.T. results and easy data recovery, I'd suggest to use a Linux rescue environment such as SystemRescueCD.

Burn the image to a CD or write it to a USB stick (with Win32 Disk Imager) and boot into it.

When you're in the rescue environment, check the S.M.A.R.T. information by opening a terminal and entering sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX (replace X with drive letter, usually it's a - you can check with lsblk command).

In the smartctl output, watch out for the Raw_Read_Error_Rate and Reallocated_Sector_Ct raw values. If those values are high, you may want to use ddrescue -n /dev/sdX drive_dump.img rescue.log to safely copy all the data to a file on another drive (or directly to another empty drive with ddrescue -n /dev/sdX /dev/sdY rescue.log).

Please check the manuals for the aforementioned tools as well before executing them. You can append --help to any of the commands for more information (e.g. ddrescue --help).

Good luck!

Condor

Posted 2017-04-24T21:50:30.240

Reputation: 55

smartctl has also been ported to windows, see http://gsmartcontrol.sourceforge.net Also for which smart values are dangerous see https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-smart-stats-indicate-hard-drive-failures/ and read more about smart on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

– BeowulfNode42 – 2017-04-24T22:30:55.063

Thanks for the information - feel free to edit the answer if you think it should be improved. I wouldn't recommend OP to do any writes to the disks and definitely not boot into the Windows environment on it anymore though. – Condor – 2017-04-24T22:51:20.167