Is my HDD Failing? (SMART Data provided)

[dankellys]

So, i think I may have a failing drive, and was wondering if anyone could confirm? If so, is there any solution to mediate the problem and prevent the drive from failing?

I ran some checks using the trial version of HD Tune Pro, the data is below:

UNSTABLE SECTORS:



DAMAGED SECTORS:


I am currently running an error scan, and will upload the results once it is complete.

[Splash]

Yes, and no. Yes, it's a warning sign and you should look to backup and replace soon. No, there's not an awful lot you can do to prevent it from failing. A hard disk is a mechanical device, and will eventually wear out.

[kompukare]

Looks like it. I assume you have everything backed up (because running test on a failing drive is VERY VERY BAD).

Anyway, 30,000 bad sectors is a lot. If you are lucky (no grinding noises) the damage is limited to a specific area, but there is nothing you can do except save your data. HDDs are not fixable.

A hard disk is a mechanical device, and will eventually wear out.

Exactly and while not great, 600+ days of usage is not that bad either.

[dankellys]

Balls...Had a feeling that was going to be the reply. I have had a lot of issues with this drive over the past few days, for example explorer crashing when trying to access it etc. I have Acronis Backup & Restore installed, so creating a bootable USB at the min, and hopefully will be able to clone the whole drive onto a 1tb external drive I have. Thankfully, it is only a data drive, and not the main boot drive, but I do have some applications installed directly on it (as my main boot drive is a very small SSD). If I do a full clone to external drive, then clone the external drive back to new internal HDD and give the new drive the same drive letter as the failing drive, will everything run exactly the same, or am i likely to run into problems after doing this?

[dankellys]

I assume you have everything backed up (because running test on a failing drive is VERY VERY BAD).

On the back of that comment, i stopped the error scan...

[kompukare]

On the back of that comment, i stopped the error scan...

Yes, it might be okay or it might not.

But anything like this you should think about what you have stored and priorities it. For instance, imagine a typical main drive in a laptop/desktop with these folder sizes:

40GB+ Windows > usually replaceable, some settings might be nice to keep up, low priority.
40GB+ Program Files>same as the Windows folder, low priority.
150GB User\My Music & Video > usually replaceable, low priority.
30GB User\my picture > mostly not replaceable (unless backed up somewhere), high priority
10Gb User\My Docs > not replaceable, high priority.

So, basically treat any failing drive as potentially only going to last for a few more minutes and copy they high priority (i.e. originals you cannot replace) first.

And if the drive were to contain really valuable data and you are willing to spend £££s, don't even attempt that but rather find reputable data recovery place and send it them rather than potentially making things worse which later would mean having to spend more money getting it recovered or making it impossible to recover irrespective of price.

[chrestomanci]

...If I do a full clone to external drive, then clone the external drive back to new internal HDD and give the new drive the same drive letter as the failing drive, will everything run exactly the same, or am i likely to run into problems after doing this?

Yes, but only if you succeed in getting everything back perfectly, which is not that likely.

Last week I suffered a similar HDD failure on the data drive for my main Linux system. (see the my system link). Once I noticed that the drive was failing, (from smart data, and system errors during boot) I stopped using the system and immediately ordered a replacement from scan.

When it arrived, I fitted it, to an e-sata port, then booted the system with a linux live cd, and used ddrescue to clone each volume in turn. This is a tool that will read quickly in big blocks until it gets errors, then slow down and retry to try to get everything. I left it to run for 36 hours and at the end of that time it recovered all but 2mb from a 2tb disc. I then used ddrutility to parse the list of unrecoverable blocks reported by ddresucue to give me a list of affected files. Finally I took LVM snapshots of the affected volumes before mounting them, so that I knew I had a pristine copy of the recovered data before I let Linux fsck attempt to repair it.

Overall, my data recovery went well. In all about 300 files where damaged, but all but one where downloaded online and so easy to replace. I did have family photos and important documents on that drive, but they all recovered perfectly and in any case I have those backed up in multiple places. The only annoying factor was the expense of paying for a new hard drive when I was not planning to, and the fact that the faulty one was only a few months out of warranty. (A WD Black)

As all these recovery steps where done with a Linux live CD, you could do the same yourself if you feel confident with the Linux command line, Though as kompukare said just now, your drive could die permanently any time, so you need to prioritise getting copies of anything irreplaceable like family photos or important documents ASAP. I have also read that it is a bad idea to power off a faulty drive, because the initial spin up is quite stressful, so it would be better to leave your system switched on until you have recovered all the data you can.

Good luck!

[dankellys]

Cheers for the replies, I am currently booted into an acronis boot disk, which is painstakingly cloning the faulty drive to an external drive, it's been running for about 2 hours and is 30% of the way through. Just hope it works!

[chrestomanci]

Cheers for the replies, I am currently booted into an acronis boot disk, which is painstakingly cloning the faulty drive to an external drive, it's been running for about 2 hours and is 30% of the way through. Just hope it works!

Big drives take a long time to read even if they are working perfectly, because of the amount of data involved.

Assuming that you have followed kompukare's advice and taken coppies of anything that cannot be replaced, the best thing to do now is to leave acronis to do it's work overnight and see how it is in the morning. If it works anything like the Linux equivalents it will gradually slow down as it it tries to get the last bit of recoverable data, and the last few Mb will take several hours.

If it is still going in the morning, then just leave it all day, and see what it gets back. You have nothing to loose by waiting it out. You may as well get the maximum you can before the drive finaly dies.

[peterb]

Cheers for the replies, I am currently booted into an acronis boot disk, which is painstakingly cloning the faulty drive to an external drive, it's been running for about 2 hours and is 30% of the way through. Just hope it works!

Its going to take longer with all those reallocated sectors anyway, the sector seek time will be up. But there is nothing you can do to speed it up - just leave it to do the best it can.

[dankellys]

Its going to take longer with all those reallocated sectors anyway, the sector seek time will be up. But there is nothing you can do to speed it up - just leave it to do the best it can.

Yup, its slowed down alright, left it running over night, and was only at 57% when I woke up this morning so have left it running whist at work today. Going to do a low-level format on it tonight, in the hope that it will buy me a little extra time (to get me through until payday, when I can buy a new drive!).

Speaking of getting an new drive, what would ppl recommend? The machine its self is used a lot, it is on 24/7, never gets shutdown, other than reboots after updates, and has a lot of read/write actions on it. As you can see it had over 600 days of usage, and I only bought it in Oct 2012! So, would something like a WD Green series be better? or even Red? Whats peoples opinions?

[peterb]

Hitachi drives have quite a good reputation for reliability. I'm currently using 4 4TB (HD7240 series) drives in 2 RAID 1 arrays. One pair has just over 9,500 hours, the other 7,800 hours. The system they are in currently has an uptime of 7296 hours. Not quite up to the usage your drive has had, but they came with a three year warranty, so I hope they'll be good for another 16,000 hours or so!

[DanceswithUnix]

Speaking of getting an new drive, what would ppl recommend? The machine its self is used a lot, it is on 24/7, never gets shutdown, other than reboots after updates, and has a lot of read/write actions on it. As you can see it had over 600 days of usage, and I only bought it in Oct 2012! So, would something like a WD Green series be better? or even Red? Whats peoples opinions?

My standard reply: Look at the length of warranty. If the people that made it don't trust it, I won't trust it.

My drives tend to be small WD Black drives for workstations, 500GB laptop drives usually as they are the cheapest drive with a 5 year warranty. I also think that if a single platter 500GB drive will work fine, then getting a 2 platter 1TB drive is just more parts to fail for no good reason, and you can get quite a few games on 500GB.

My home server has WD Red drives which I think are only 3 year, but they they are in a raid mirror set so seemed the tool for the job.

I don't know anyone that likes the Green drives. Slower, feels more like they are built down to a price.

[peterb]

smartctl 6.0 2012-10-10 r3643 [x86_64-linux-3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-12, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     Hitachi HDS724040ALE640
Serial Number:    <removed>
LU WWN Device Id: 5 000cca 22bd43f73
Firmware Version: MJAOA3B0
User Capacity:    4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm
Device is:        Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Thu Jun 26 15:50:00 2014 BST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

General SMART Values:
<snip>

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000b   100   100   016    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  2 Throughput_Performance  0x0005   137   137   054    Pre-fail  Offline      -       79
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0007   134   134   024    Pre-fail  Always       -       538 (Average 616)
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       96
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   005    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000b   100   100   067    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  8 Seek_Time_Performance   0x0005   119   119   020    Pre-fail  Offline      -       35
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0012   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       7882
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013   100   100   060    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       96
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       116
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       116
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0002   117   117   000    Old_age   Always       -       51 (Min/Max 21/56)
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0022   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0008   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x000a   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0

SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged

and

smartctl 6.0 2012-10-10 r3643 [x86_64-linux-3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-12, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     Hitachi HDS724040ALE640
Serial Number:    <removed>
LU WWN Device Id: 5 000cca 22bc91160
Firmware Version: MJAOA3B0
User Capacity:    4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm
Device is:        Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Thu Jun 26 15:54:55 2014 BST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

General SMART Values:
<snip>

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000b   100   100   016    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  2 Throughput_Performance  0x0005   137   137   054    Pre-fail  Offline      -       78
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0007   134   134   024    Pre-fail  Always       -       539 (Average 616)
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       123
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   005    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000b   100   100   067    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  8 Seek_Time_Performance   0x0005   117   117   020    Pre-fail  Offline      -       36
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0012   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       9538
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013   100   100   060    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       123
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       446
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       446
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0002   125   125   000    Old_age   Always       -       48 (Min/Max 19/56)
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0022   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0008   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x000a   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       2

But of course my experience doesn't mean you will get the same - which is why I use RAID AND ensure I take a regular backup. Any drive can fail at any time - statistics apply to a populations, not an individual item

(I've snipped out some of the less relevant data - and the UDM_CRC_Error_Count ocurred during the first 6 hours of use and was caused by a dodgy SATA cable)

[DanceswithUnix]

Hitachi drives have quite a good reputation for reliability. I'm currently using 4 4TB (HD7240 series) drives in 2 RAID 1 arrays. One pair has just over 9,500 hours, the other 7,800 hours. The system they are in currently has an uptime of 7296 hours. Not quite up to the usage your drive has had, but they came with a three year warranty, so I hope they'll be good for another 16,000 hours or so!

Sadly the current Toshiba badged variants seem to only have a 2 year warranty, but notice they are on offer today so nice price: http://www.ebuyer.com/393828-toshiba...ive-dt01aca100

[dankellys]

Sadly the current Toshiba badged variants seem to only have a 2 year warranty, but notice they are on offer today so nice price: http://www.ebuyer.com/393828-toshiba...ive-dt01aca100

Cheers! Went for that one, got it slightly cheaper on Amazon (if you include the ebuyer next day delivery charge), where I have Prime, so next day delivery is free