Hard Drive Jesus

[EenBeeFour]

Sup.

I've gone through about 3-4 external hard drives in the past few years that were mainly second hand. I've been rather lucky with them, backing them up to another, more newer, external drive and them dying a few days later.

Currently using this drive as a temporary solution, it's my mother's and is usually swapped between being connected to my computer and the set top box to watch TV shows and movies that have been recorded from TV.


The previous two hard drives I had were an older version of the listed drive, the first being 1TB and the second being a 2TB. Both met the miserable fate of corruption and the clicking of doom. I only just recently took them out of their external drive cases and put them into my computer, so now they are using SATA cables instead of USB 2.0.

The weird thing is, they are now showing up like as if they have been fine all along, aside from one being formatted and left like that which I have to get around to fixing and it will be as a good as new.



Why are they now appearing to work completely fine compared to being completely dead and having no power running through them when they were in the cases and using USB 2.0? I even tried swapping the little connectors that have the USB 2.0 port and power port with new ones to see if that would make a difference, but simply switching to SATA and using the PSU to power them have completely revitalized them. Am I Jesus or something?

[SugarD]

The external systems may have had power-related issues that were damaging the hard drives. If I were you, I'd back up all of the data on them and then be done with them. It is only a matter of time until they completely fail.

[EenBeeFour]

The external systems may have had power-related issues that were damaging the hard drives. If I were you, I'd back up all of the data on them and then be done with them. It is only a matter of time until they completely fail.

I formatted them because they have old versions of files that are already backed up.



Drive G: was the original drive that had most of my videogames and school-related files, and it failed in around 2012-2013. Drive H: is the backup of that drive and that one failed just recently last month, and Drive F: is holding all the files from that drive.

The two drives are formatted and working like as if they were brand new.

[SugarD]

If you had problems such as the ones you described, I would not suggest keeping anything you don't want to lose on there.

[EenBeeFour]

I did a test with SeaTools on both of them and neither of them were successful, I'm going to do a system check on them with the DOS version of SeaTools then a few other repairs to ensure they are usable.

[SugarD]

I did a test with SeaTools on both of them and neither of them were successful, I'm going to do a system check on them with the DOS version of SeaTools then a few other repairs to ensure they are usable.

Those tools can't repair hardware damage.

[EenBeeFour]

Those tools can't repair hardware damage.

You know what I mean by repair.

[Devin]

I have no idea how you managed to kill the drives in such a short period of time, do you eject them before disconnecting them? 
If you check the drives health with seagate tools what are the results looking like?

[EenBeeFour]

I have no idea how you managed to kill the drives in such a short period of time, do you eject them before disconnecting them? 
If you check the drives health with seagate tools what are the results looking like?

Nah I do the safe remove.

They are smooth the entire way through but they end up with corrupt sectors just near the end and the tests claim them as corrupt. They pass every test except the Short Generic which is an outer, inner scan and a random read apparently. Compared to Long Generic, it reads the entire drive from beginning to end and takes a longer time. It stops completely once it hits a bad sector detection.

[Devin]

For interest sakes, what are the manufacturers of those corrupt drives?
I have had issues with seagate drives in the past getting corrupt sectors randomly. End up tossing the drive or using it as a doorstop.

So far with Samsung and WD I haven't had a single fault yet.
If data is important to you, just pay the extra bit to get a respectable brand of drive in the future.

[Archie]

Hmm... I also have an Seagate HDD which has 500GB of capacity. The interesting thing is, I have never had a problem with my HDD, works really nice.

[EenBeeFour]

Mine last awhile until they start corrupting, I have an Intel HDD as my primary and I've had it for 6 years with no corruptions at all, gone through numerous computers and reformats. The only problem I have with Seagate drives is that they are clunky and get very dirty when they are moved around a lot. I want to get Samsung or Intel drives if I had the money, but I need to get a job first.

[SugarD]

Mine last awhile until they start corrupting...

They are permanently damaged then. You should replace them immediately before they fail. They aren't "starting" to corrupt. They are already beyond repair. You are just getting lucky that the formatting is preventing your system from accessing the bad sectors, which the problems will increase, and eventually become unavoidable.

[john_2002]

maybe when the drive is plugged in, windows doesn't assign it a drive letter which could lead you to thinking the HDD has broken. this has happened to me when plugging in my seagate external drive to another computer. to fix it, go into disk management and right click the drive, and press assign drive letter and choose a drive letter.

[EenBeeFour]

maybe when the drive is plugged in, windows doesn't assign it a drive letter which could lead you to thinking the HDD has broken. this has happened to me when plugging in my seagate external drive to another computer. to fix it, go into disk management and right click the drive, and press assign drive letter and choose a drive letter.

...No.