Is my hard drive failing?

Hi!

I might have a failing hard drive, but I am not sure so I wanted to try and ask in this forum. The PC and a hard drive is almost 5 years old.

Lately I have heard a couple of times a weird squeaky noise from my hard drive. It has happent a couple of times and

it did not last long it was just kind of a one squeak. I tried to run WD Data Life Guard. A quick test didn´t even start it showed that it failed and the status code was 07. The extended test ran for about 6 hours and came up with bad sectors (I think it showed 1 bad sector) and it could not repair. Then I used other HDD monitoring software like hard drive sentinel (trial) and it showed that everything is fine (health good and no wear, everything was about 98%). Then I tried to use passmarks DiskCheckup and it could not run either quick nor a long test. Had some kind of and error.  Last thing I tried was windows own check disk (chkdsk). I ran it from my computer and from properties (tools) of that disk. The disk itself is a secondary disk (without operating system). For windows I have 120GB SSD. Chkdsk prompted to run on startup and i scheduled it. On restart the chkdsk did not start. It booted to a black screen and I waited about half an hour for it to start, but nothing happened. Only thing that showed on the black screen was some kind of a line on top of the screen (across the top edge of the screen). The line was blurry and consisted of colored pixels. And at the start of this black screen in chkdsk the hard drive was making a high pitched noise like squealing of some sorts. The sound went away in about a minute or so and then nothing. The smart status in all programs shows up as everything is ok. In performance part I think everything is working fine and I haven´t found any corrupt files or anything suspicious while using this drive. Just that it does not pass or even start any HDD tests and a couple of times heard some odd sound. Most of the time it just sounds like a normal hard drive.

So i am hoping to get some insight from people with experience or advice on what to do. Change the hard drive or not?

I have searched a lot of forums and kind of did not find anything very similar to what I am experiencing.

Here are specs from Piriform Speccy:

I use a tool that will give you read times on your disk, so it can show what state all the sectors are in as well as the one's that are failing.

Test your HDD with HDDScan.

• Download the zip archive and extract it to a new folder on your desktop.
• Open the folder and double-click HDDScan.exe, and click Yes at the prompt.
• First click on the  button and wait for the report.
• If any of the lights on the side are red please copy and paste the whole line in your reply.
• If all are green, click on the blue disk orb in the middle of the screen  and then "Surface Tests" from the menu that appears
• In the new screen click
• In the bottom Test Manager window double click the test that is executing.
• Click on the Map tab, here you can watch the scan progress until it is finished.
• The read times on the right are how long the blocks take to respond to query.

• If you have any Bads the disk is faulty and needs replacing
• if you have any >500ms entries your disk may become faulty sooner, rather than later.
• <500ms entries are cautionary, this is a sign of an aging disk.

How does your disk show in the last two categories?

Edited by TsVk!, 22 January 2017 - 04:30 AM.

Thank you TsVk! for a fast reply and for a nice free HDD testing software. So I ran these scans.

SMART scan did not reveal any red lights, but I got 2 yellow ones:

Yellow 97 Current Pending Errors Count 200 200 0000000000-0001 000

Yellow 198 Uncorrectable Errors Count 200 200 0000000000-0001 000

And the surface test showed 79 in orange enteries (<500ms) no red ones. And one entry in Bads.

I will share a link from my google drive with the actual reports:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B0Cy5EQakqmVRkJYRDBXUzI5Z3M?usp=sharing

So does it now mean that I should replace my HDD? 

Edited by xTeChN0, 22 January 2017 - 05:45 PM.

It means your HDD is in decline. I highly recommend you buy another disk and clone your system soon, before you have to end up rebuilding your whole operating system.

Your current disk may yet still run for a while, but replacing it is inevitable. It's a quick job to clone your system and you'll be good to go, whereas you'll be stuffing around for days to rebuild your system how you like it again. In this situation I ask myself... How much is my time worth? What would I rather be doing than sitting around re-installing software? Then I don't hesitate and just go out and buy a new disk. It is already paid for by the time I will save.

If you need any help or advice with cloning just let me know.

Just to add to the subject.

Some disks will run with a bad sector for years, others with fail a month after the first one appearing. As your disk doesn't have any very slow sectors it's possible it could be one of the one's that keep going. It's also very possible that it will just crap itself and stop working soon. It's the same sort of situation when you put off repairs on your car. 

Thank you for your help! I think I will buy a new disk. But I would like to use you´re help a little bit more.

I have been looking for a replacement disk and kind of got down to 2 choices. One is Seagate SSHD Desktop FireCuda Guardian ST1000DX002 and the second one is WD black caviar WD1003FZEX. Both are 1TB drives as I actually do not need a lot of space. Never used more than about 800GB I think.

I want it to be my secondary drive (OS drive is on 120GB SSD) and I use it for storage, gaming, some 2D drawing and 3D modeling. I would like it to be faster than my old drive, but the budged does not reach much higher than those two drives I wrote about. And really 1TB is enough for my secondary drive. Speed and reliability is more important for me.

Which one out of those two drives are a better choice in your opinion and why? Or maybe you know another good 1TB drive in the same price range?

And yes I would like some help in cloning my drive. I have games and some programs with settings on my failing drive and I would like if after cloning I could get exactly the same situation on my PC as it is with my old drive. Do I need to look out for something when cloning? For example BIOS settings or putting my new drive in the same SATA socket after cloning and so on? Can you recommend some good free software to do the cloning? I have never cloned a drive so don´t know what to expect out of the process.

Out of the two drives, looking at the data sheets here.

http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/firecuda-family/firecuda/files/firecuda-ds-1903-1-1606us.pdf

https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_assets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-771434.pdf

I see that although most of the specs are the same the power consumption is less with the Seagate, as well as the range of operating temps being slightly broader. So if I had to pick one I would go for the Seagate. I'm not really knowledgeable in the current offerings on the HDD market as I have gone completely to SSD, so sorry I can't offer you any further insight.

Cloning is really straight forward if

1. you have enough space on your target disk to contain all the data from your source disk
2. use the right software for the application.

You don't have to worry about SATA ports, BIOS or anything like that. It's really quite simple.

As far as software goes I use Acronis True Image Home for basic Windows OS cloning, it has never let me down. It's a simple point and shoot software.

1. power off and attach only the two disks you want to work with (source and target)
2. reboot to your Acronis boot disk you created
3. click clone
4. click Auto
5. it will detect your disk with data and select that as the source, click ok
6. it will confirm your empty disk as the target, click ok
7. Wait for it to complete, then power down
8. remove your old disk and your Acronis boot media
9. Boot into your new disk

Other popular solutions I've heard talked about are EaseUS and Macrium Reflect. They are well rated and I've never heard a bad word about them. Both are probably extremely simple to use also, I've just not had any reason to try them as I've been using the same Acronis disk for maybe 8 years.

Ok! And thank you for your help TsVk!. I was thinking about trying the Firecuda myself so I put an order in already. We´ll see how good this drive is. It should at least be better than my old drive. So an upgrade nonetheless. After I get the drive going to try cloning it.

So while I am waiting for my new drive to arrive I was looking into that cloning stuff and found out that you cannot clone a disk with different sector sizes (bytes per sector). My old drive has 512 bytes per sector and new one that I ordered has 4096. Any insight on that?   Haven´t yet found any real possibility to do this cloning. Acronis True Image website is specifically saying that their program does not support this.

Use Macrium Reflect free or fee and make full images of your partitions onto external media; your present HD is going to go bad eventually.

So while I am waiting for my new drive to arrive I was looking into that cloning stuff and found out that you cannot clone a disk with different sector sizes (bytes per sector). My old drive has 512 bytes per sector and new one that I ordered has 4096. Any insight on that?   Haven´t yet found any real possibility to do this cloning. Acronis True Image website is specifically saying that their program does not support this.

In this case you would need to use Clonezilla then. It's a Linux based program and has a lot more options and powerful commands. I've found that when using it you should be very certain about the settings that you use. Like all Linux systems, if you tell it to destroy your disks it will. No arguments. I use it to generate backups over networks and clone damaged disks, I have found it can sometimes be fiddly but will do the job where "point and shoot" software fails.

I suggest you try it first with it's default settings as a whole disk image. If that doesn't work try creating an image backup to another disk and then restoring it to your new disk. (I know it's starting to get more complicated).

I ended up using Macrium Reflect Free and did a disk image and restored it to my new drive. Seemed a bit easier to do. Seems that everything is working as it should for now.

If anything else happens do tell us, we got a lot of tech savvy folks round here so you are in good hands

I ended up using Macrium Reflect Free and did a disk image and restored it to my new drive. Seemed a bit easier to do. Seems that everything is working as it should for now.

That's great. I checked Macrium's documentation the other day and it said it didn't do 512>4096 cloning. I must have been reading old information, I'm glad it worked out. (I learned something too )

Happy computing.

I'm betting the target HD that was 4096 is now 512.