I remember having my harddrive die on me when I was maybe like 15. It was like 3 am and I was working on some of my music when it happened and I thought I lost everything and just started crying. I had years of writing, pictures and so much more on that drive and when it failed it made my heart break. Luckily the data was salvageable but ever since that incident I have been super careful with backups and cloud storage on all of my devices. Never wanna go through something like that again.
I'm glad at the very least that all my pictures and most of my important data has been backed up to the cloud and locally is on SSDs now. I still have a single, used, 500GB HDD in my machine that is more just for random videos I've made or other not really needed files.
@D never read better words in my life lol. Aussie internet is 100000% worse than almost any country out there. Even the average school network connection per user is like 2mbps, in the US that would be at least 20. Australians have it harder than alot of people when it comes to internet.
My best tale for data recovery comes from my early teens. I was 1. Dumb, 2. Not financially stable, and 3. DUMB. I was able to totally recover all of my data from an old 60GB drive with a combination of a week of time, a freezer, and lots of attempts with ddrescue. I was ultimately able to get a bit-accurate image, and restored it to another junky drive from a recycling pull... That promptly died as well. And what was I trying to save? Some old game repacks that took a long time to download over dialup. Just had to save that copy of UT2K4. The good ol' days.
I find it a shame that these days many channels use video titles that aren't at all descriptive of what the video is about. I typically don't bother clicking. This video's topic is especially interesting and I'm lucky I clicked on it.
Yes, I know it's for the algorithm. I usually make it a point not to click videos like this. My actions are only a drop in the bucket, but if everyone followed suit we could change the algorithm/tactic. Regarding the comment about Jay - I agree, he's become worse and I stopped watching his videos. I try and support creators that don't bow to poor tactics such as Gamers Nexus and L1.
For its age, the original hard drive in my oldest laptop still works fine with no bad sectors. Its a Toshiba Satellite 330 CDS from 1998 with its original 4 gb hard drive. Not bad that it still works fine even after almost 24 years since it was made and I have it running Windows 98 second edition.
@@FreakyCh3rry it means an area of a hard disk platter that is damaged physically, either by contaminants getting into the drive of the head scratching the platter due to the hard disk being handled too rough.
A good tip to hearing a drive even in a case with fans going. is a non-magnetic screwdriver. rest the tip of the driver (bigger the better) on the drive surface gently and put the handle in your ear... the sound travels up the driver and you can hear it. even in a server with multiple drives. Do not impale yourself!
@@tspooner01 Yes and no. The newer systems have fans that don't spin all the time or will spin slowly. This is also a sign that the fans are failing. I did have one fail though and I was able to tell because that particular fan never came on even when the others were screaming along at the highest RPM. Poking the fan with a small plastic stirrer resulted in the fan spinning up, which means the motor or bearings are failing. If the fan makes noise though, that's a bit different.
SSD failure is usually gradual unless the controller just gives up in one go, where you can't tell that will happen outside of knowing that the product line is faulty. Otherwise things like flash exhaustion the SSD will report, and Windows will notify the user that there is an issue (Windows checks SMART stats).
@@Clavichordist easy enough, install speed fan or adjust the fan curve in the bios, see if it spins up. If you need to check the actual rpm, tachometers are like $30, though don't think you'll get a case where it won't be whining if fan bearing is coming loose, so checking the actual RPM doesn't really make sense.
Many years ago I had two 80gig hard drives in raid 0 for OS, apps, and a lot of personal files. One of them started squeaking, but I ignored it. Then one day it made a sound like a shovel being dragged across concrete and died. Nothing was recoverable, and I learned some valuable lessons.
I've had pretty good luck with high capacity refurbished enterprise drives for my home NAS. As long as you buy from a reputable vendor (read: not ebay) they'll have some sort of warranty and easy(ish) return policy.
Nothing wrong with eBay, just have to double check it comes with a warranty from the company and it's a reputable seller and not 60 year old Jim from IT selling random drives out his closet.
@@thiefrules I like Server Supply for used drives, but if you are wanting to roll the dice, Amazon and Newegg Marketplace often have used drives for sale. Just make sure you get some kind of warranty, erase the entire drive as step one (to protect yourself), and then run a full smart diagnostic (to check or bad sectors), follow by benchmarks (to make sure the drive isn't crap performance like a dying drive often is). Return any drive with bad, reallocated, or unstable sectors.
Actually had a drive issue very recently. Turned out my harddrive was getting oddly warm and caused it to crash everytime i was gaming off of it. Cleaned my pc, upgraded cooling, no more crashing, no event viewer logs
Getting too hot can cause long-term damage to a harddrive as well (I've killed a couple like this), so I'd recommend making sure everything is backed up right now, and replace the drive when you can.
I used to work for a PC warranty place (early-to-mid 2000s) and in our engineers handbook we literally had 'lift the PC 2 inches off the ground and drop' as the official solution to resolve a stuck hard drive (when the head keeps clicking rather than reading/parking). I remember thinking it was a bit odd but when one of my hard drives got stuck I did it and it worked (took two drops though). Of course I ordered a new hard drive and transferred the data because I knew I'd have caused some surface damage to the platters but I couldn't have got my data (without one of those super expensive data recovery companies) without that maneuverer and would have lost everything. Sometimes mechanical issues require mechanical solutions, not saying it works every time but it's def worth a go before spending money on a data recovery service.
My mother worked in IT and this was a legit solution at her work. (It was the easier version of opening the computer taking the hard drive out and slinging it, which was the earlier fix.)
@@foodhatesme You're calling a hard drives paper weights? And no it's not caused by a stepper motor, stuck heads are caused by numerous things such as dirt/lube build up, shock damage, failed pre-amps.
Out of literally thousands of drive failures I have seen over the years, I have only ever seen S.M.A.R.T detect a problem on 2 drives that I didn't already know were failing. I have also had drives that S.M.A.R.T condemned very early on in life last for 5-6 additional years without any issue so I don't really trust S.M.A.R.T data for anything other than a quick gauge to see what the drive has been through and potential physical issues it may already be suffering from.
i have some drive tester with that on my desktop ive had since april 2021, the hdd is still at "100% health" while the ssd has decreased to 96% in 17 months, i have no idea how its possible
@@Rhyean2004 Drive SSD health is based on how many writes you have done. If you're writing, erasing, etc.. is going to reduce it quickly. On the good side compared to HDDS.. HDDS can die instantly with no way to recover from one day to another (clicking problem). While SSDs usually degrade until they are do not allow you to write anymore, but your data can be still recovered.
You must be much better than the average techie at identifying issues then. I also have had SMART detect two failing drives (that later would fail), but in my case I've only had 4 of my drives fail in my life, and the first two were before I knew anything about computers. (a couple weeks old Samsung 1.5TB and an aging Maxtor 120GB) As for drives it detected that would later die, I only remember the story of one of them. I picked up two Seagate 500GB drives I saw laying on the concrete next to a dumpster. Both of them had reallocated sectors but were virtually unused. One of them got worse quickly and ended up dying, the other kept working until I no longer needed it. I think they were old spares from a company that they literally tossed out (looked clean & near-pristine)
I've always found it odd that none of the drives I've used have ever failed. I still use an external drive my dad bought like almost 15 years ago for himself and it still works and only had 3 bad sectors last time I checked.
All my IDE drives from the 1980s and 1990s eventually croaked by the end of the 2000s. My 2000s drives all died, too. But everything I've had since the 2010s has been surviving. My oldest working drives now began use in 2012. In my machine I use most, I've got two drives from 2018 that seem to be working... although, since June, the 2018 mechanical has been making a clockbeat rhythm and I'm unsure why. I'll load it up in BIOS soon and see if it's doing it there, too. I can easily sustain the loss, and it's a smaller capacity single terrabyte drive. If it's making the sounds in BIOS after I reseat the drives in the drive bay, and all the cables, then I suppose that's fine. I was intending to replace the drive anyway in the near future. I think you're right, Aki. My experience with modern junk is that it's great, at least compared to the old IDE drives. LOL Those things are dinosaur tech.
I have a drive from 2006 that still appears to be working as of less than a year ago. I haven't used it recently, but I wouldn't be surprised if it still works. I've been fortunate so far as well and have never seen a hard drive fail either. Believe it or not, I've had RAM fail on me before. Very weird odds of what I've seen if you ask me.
Fun video, Having experienced plenty of hardware failures on all kinds of storage due to work and my own personal storage at home, I'm probably never beyond 200 feet of a failing or failed hard drive. I say this because the video came up and I was just looking at a box with 5 untested hard drives. Certainly helped pass the time while I check them before backing up anything salvageable off them.
S.M.A.R.T. tracking is the only tracking i support with no questions. It can tell you how many hours the drive has been powered on and each time it has been turned to park or stopped as well as what Anthony mentioned.
You can also initiate SMART self-tests with smartmontools that are both OS-independent and log the results to the drive's internal SMART self-test log. Whenever I get a new magnetic drive, first thing I do is a selective test across the whole surface (smartctl -t select,0-max) so that if a new drive arrives with any bad sectors, it goes straight back to the vendor for replacement, and the drive is basically blighted at that point because the self-test results are baked into the drive's self-test log.
I recently ordered a 4tb Exos drive that was advertised as brand new, after opening it, i immediately knew that it was pre-owned so I fired up CrystalDiskInfo and lo and behold, it had been powered on for 36000 hours and only powered on 24 times. Thankfully, the seller was willing to give a refund so it all worked out. Thank god for SMART.
@@dirg3music I've had some drives where the CrystalDiskInfo stats just don't make sense. Such as those numbers you describe. What situation would a drive only be booted some two dozen times for over 30k hours?
@@FlyboyHelosim Servers. I have a few dozen drives running that have over 55'000h of run time, and where only powered on 3-4 times. (mind you, Seagate Exos drives are enterprise drives)
@@RobinCernyMitSuffix Yeah, sure. Except I don't have any server hard drives. The scenario I talked about applies to consumer-grade hard drives taken out of laptops. I've also noticed erroneous numbers linked to hard drives taken out of things like Sky TV boxes.
Drives sometimes do operations that aren't transperant to the viewer that could be mistaken as failure. I believe some have to do with getting rid of stiction for instance.
The usual first sign of a magnetic drive on its way out due to substrate failure is when Windows throws a delayed write failed error. You might also get loads of errors in the SMART error log. That's the point where you should already have made backups, and if not, get the most critical shit copied off ASAP because the drive isn't likely to survive the day. I've had several hard drives go out this way, and the fun part is that the failures are predictable months in advance if you do sequential read tests of the whole drive and you have sections where the read speed drops through the floor, as those are areas where the substrate is already failing, but hasn't quite gone completely dead yet.
Місяць тому
Thanks big dog, mi NAS se jodieron dos discos así con 8Tb. Dammm
Victoria HDD/SSD is the tool of choice for me. It's free and has a lot more information and indications of a bad drive. You can even find out if the sectors are weak (but not dead yet).
Hah, back in high school (almost 20 years ago...) my dad's work laptop died due to a seized drive... opened that sucker up in the cleanest area of the house, poked the spindle, sealed it back up, and used that drive and laptop as a server for four years. I only retired it because I wanted a more powerful machine. Sometimes these machines can surprise you.
You got lucky. Next time use a laminar flow hood. Any dust can murder a drive and there are millions if not billions of dust particles in a clean home.
10min video with 2 mins of self promotions/sponsors/unrelated content, you make 5 of these a week each containing 20% ads and you get a full video of nothing but ads, remember guys we allowed this to be a standard
I know right! They shouldn't be able to make money with sponsors, they should be making all this amazing content for free, they're so rude trying to make money in order to keep making amazing content for us, they're so selfish.
Had a few failures over my years. Most were insignificant. Only one was slightly significant as it was a failure of one of my servers HDD's. Thanks to the combo of zfs and zed I got an email about the failure while I was sitting in school (this is several years back now) so I was able to just pick up a replacement drive on my walk back home and swap it in.
What a coincidence! I was already running a SMART test of my hard drives 15 minutes before I saw this video ---btw DriveDX is a very good software option for Mac users
As an IT guy, having experienced firsthand how unreliable spinning rust is, my instinct when someone asks me this question is to always reply with, 'yes, yes it probably is.' You can never trust hard drives, especially consumer level stuff (laptops/external drives etc).
yeah they just die and die and die. SSDs have proven soo much more reliable for me. 50% of the hard disks my family and I have used have died, yet only two SSDs have died so far. One being a 2011 OCZ SSD that became well-known for being unreliable, and the other the cheapest SSD I ever bought, which died in the first 2 weeks. I personally use my SSDs very heavily and like to run them in RAID0 (I know..)
@@n646n Same. Never experienced a hard drive failure within 20 years of using computers. Many second hand purchases. Cheap flash drives on the other hand
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for this video. I am old enough that I should definitely know better. Your vid prompted me to check my only remaining HDD status. Got 'Pred Fail' and found loads of bad block errors. Replaced with a 1TB SDD. Thank you Anthony!
What a coincidence that this video shows up couple days after I noticed that my oldest (7 years) SSD has been throwing up Event ID 7 (bad block) messages on Event Viewer for months. Weirdly it's failing sooner than my 11-year-old HDD. Hopefully you'll make that SSD version of this video soon 😅
Samsung SDD from early 2021? RMA it, these are known factory defects on models from January to April 2021. You will get a new one that doesn't age prematurely.
@@Grocel512 SSD in question is Samsung 850 Evo from 2015 so no RMA but I have to keep your comment in mind and check my Samsung 970s which I bought in 2021, they might be from that batch even though they still work perfectly.
@@Fortzon You should be fine then. The nvme products were not affected. If you had a SATA 870 EVO 2TB or 4TB you would have to watch out for ECC error rate and unrecoverable error rates. I had an affected unit (4TB) that I RMA'ed.
I've bought 4 "New Pull" HDDs over the span of 6 years and only one of them has failed 6 months ago, but granted it was the older one I bought. I'd say it's pretty safe to buy these types of drives, I've had OEM HDDs -especially from HP PC's and laptops- fail much faster (and way harder) than these used ones. Obviously YMMV, but I'd still say these types of drives are a pretty good deal IMO.
Meanwhile a friends dad had a hard drive with increasingly bad sectors, a semi broken MBR and no backup. As soon as we found the issue we made a backup, but yet he still went on and did all of his work on that very drive for another two years. Until his outlook database got struck. The recovery program didn't want to recover the files and he didn't save the correct file. Luckily cloning the drive with ddrescue and repairing the database on the clone was possible and all of his work of the past 6 months was saved. The new hard drive hasn't shown any issues so far, but the file system is still the same, so we are now trying to get away from that machine and sort all the data accumulated over the last 10 years as soon as he has another system to work with. Hopefully with a better backup strategy
This is very relevant to my interests as I've got a bunch of old hard drives I recently put into a computer after years of sitting idle and I want to see if they are healthy.
I recently had a Seagate Exos 16TB die on me, i only had it for half a year so luckily i can count on the warranty. It made weird noises and windows didn't initialise the disk anymore. When i managed to initialise the disk and ran a surface test it showed loads of bad clusters too. 16TB of data.. gone..
This video came at the right time to remind me to A.Finish cleaning up (and moving data off) the old HDD I have (I bought more SSD and now I don't need this old HDD anymore, especially since its probably more than 10 years old) and B.Once that's done, do a full backup.
Last winter the NVME M.2 SSD on my laptop died for no reason, and it took a week to find a data recovery company and then 1.5 months to do recovery + 2 months to bring in order what has been recovered. After that day I always create backups on external drives, on a regular basis :)
SMART is (in my experience) totally unreliable. Disks die without ever giving an early warning through SMART. I just don't think hard drive vendors want to tell the customer that the disk is failing because they don't want warranty repairs, so it is not in their interest to signal early failure... Just treat disks as unreliable things and have a backup. No point in trying to predict anything here, really.
I just wish there was a solid program that could actually interpret the individual SMART values without needing background in what they each mean. Past CrystalDiskInfo's "Good/Caution/Fail" that is.
Probably in a world of how it used to be, but I have long been a massive fan of Spinrite. Has recovered more than a few hardrives and data that was otherwise considered too bad to recover.
My first hard drive still works, I can't put it in anything anymore, but it still works. I have most of my old drives in external enclosures and check them once in a while and they're all still good. The only drive I've ever had fail on me was because I accidentally scraped a component off the exposed board but it only had games on it so I didn't need to recover anything from it.
(This is early onset) If you are noticing any errors what so ever. there is another option... after your diagnostics have shown there is a drive failure. You can use "HDD regenerator" this can potentially move information on bad sectors to un-allocated sectors... once completed a windows health check is needed through command prompt outside windows "chkdsk /f /r" ... once completed the drive should be repaired to an extent(data wise).... use a clone program to clone the data from the bad drive to a new drive. Hope this helps
So I got my Seagate Constellation ISE 2TB back in 2012, and its been running as my Main Data for years, online, nearly 24/7 without any shutdown. In 2019 it still had a 10/10 SMART reading. I still use my 2TB COnstellation as a high speed HDD archieve (nothing important, just stuff I dont want to delete or I dont run for a while and move it off my M.2 NVME). Today its still 10/10 SMART with the same parameters I get in all check disk and disk health programs since 2012, 2015, 2019 and 2022.
According to a decade of extensive testing by Google across its millions of datacentre drives, SMART is not a reliable, or even unreliable, measure of the health of a hard drive. What boggles my mind is that the two of the three most reliable measures are completely ignored: sound and latency. Sound is mostly indicative of bearing wear, though it also speaks to behaviour which SMART should be reporting if it's problematic, ie uncorrectable error rate, which leads to... Higher latency is by far the most important metric. As a drive ages it has an increased media error rate, and that leads to it re-reading blocks and after a simple re-read fails - re-calibrating. It's the re-calibrating that is the most obvious audible behaviour change with an unhealthy drive. The latency is easy to ignore, but you do so at your peril. Lastly, spin-up duration is also indicative of both bearing health and media health. In a sane world the OS would be keeping stats for how long spin-up takes, and when a trend towards longer duration is established, the drive should be powered off and you should be warned to duplicate it in read-only mode before its imminent demise. SMART record, but not log, spin-up time. Out of context of past behaviour it's nearly meaningless.
i actually have CrystalDiskInfo running in the background all the time and it notifies me if a problem has started with the HDD and fun fact: my (my old) Hearing aids have a t-coil mode that i can use to listen to the electrical signals coming off of the hard drive and i can tell if something is wrong with it...
As someone who's expanding a plex server and is thinking about going WD gold (i was outgrowing my space quickly before, and needed a drive, so went external, and going to use those for cold backup. Mind you, I'm running 51tb on my server, a 1tb ssd and 50tb of HDDs for plex). But I'd love to see an in depth talk about different "trim levels" of hard drives, across both WD and Seagate, especially covering how Gold might or might not be worth the money.
SSDs have very limited write cycles, and it eventually dies when written to so many times. So while it theoretically have a long read-only life cycle, it’s not always the use-case.
Good ones are between 4 to 8 times more expensive for the same storage and have a limited number of write times that is significantly inferior to what an HDD can bring to the table.
Sure, and that's probably the recommended strategy for most uses just because of power consumption, which I'm very conscious of during this heatwave. That having been said, it gets expensive when your storage demands exceed about 4 terabytes.
I was going to buy an external hdd at my go to pc shop, also got some ram and asked for regular 3.5 hdds, the guy just handed me free 500gb hdds, got 4 of them for free, now i have 2tb of free storage, and i use it for backup! They were used on old servers, but were from 2014-2015, i got there in 2019, so i thought what the hell, they are free, lets try them out, still safely saving my music and photos till this day, shout out *undisclosed* pc shop! Your services were simply the best!
For more than a decade I have used a multi-tier mirroring backup strategy. So far I've never lost anything. Every computer in my home has a Data drive where the files are stored, I never use the OS drive for data, and that Data drive has a DataBackup Robocopy Mirror drive in the same case. Then every computer has TWO external hard drives that the Data drive is also Robocopy mirrored to. Then I have a NAS that has 32TB in it that every computer is also Robocopy mirrored to. And finally, I have a large Google Drive where my most important files are backed up to. I also have all of my code on a Microsoft Azure repository for an additional backup of my software development. Using Robocopy scripts means that I can quickly double click on a batch file to perform any of the required backups to any of the destination devices.
The initial title was so non descriptive. I’m glad they hanged it and I semi guessed what the video was about based on the thumbnail and the fact that Anthony was in it.
My Hitachi Deathstar 80GB drives had this nifty self-test thing they'd do at roughly 1h45min intervals where you'd hear a series of whines at different pitches, and a click or two, before it'd go silent again. The first time I heard mine do this I was mortified at the thought of my brand-new drive already failing - especially since when I was using my mom's computer which had its batch-mate installed I noticed that drive did the same thing. Later I learned it was part of the drive's self-testing functionality, and I actually began enjoying the cute little hums/whines and clicks it would make.
Thank you by telling me about crystal disc info you helped me save half of my data from failing with that device but it’s safe now because I’m trans ported it to my other healthy disc thanks so much
My drive began taking longer to boot like half an hour just to boot from off and just yesterday it got to an hour and a half. No weird noises just out of nowhere got that bad. Ended up making an exact copy of the drive to my SSD that just had games on it and wow is it lightning fast now. I plan to replace my secondary drive with an SSD and replace the game one that’s now being used for OS. The old drive was 5 years old.
From working at a PC store during high school and dealing with 20+ broken hard drives during these times, I can say that CrystalDiskInfo under Windows and "Pending Sector Count" and "Reallocated Sectors" are the best signs of immediate failure. For everything above 0, prepare to immediately save your data and replace the drive. It usually also already triggers "WARNING" in CrystalDiskInfo, which means your drive is about to bust. In comparison, that self-test and stuff are not that relevant imo, they are pretty useless and say "okay" way too often on broken drives.
I remember my wife's laptop drive crapped out and started clicking. Her laptop got super slow and kept hanging. She freaked out when I took it apart and put it in the freezer. In hindsight, I should have put it in a ziplock first, but it still worked out fine. Managed to get it recognized again and moved the important stuff to an SSD. What's funny about it all is years later, when building my first TrueNAS, I pulled it out of storage and threw it in a mirror with some other old drives, and it has zero bad sectors and stopped clicking. Lol. Edit: And like the other amazing claims on here, yes, it's an old Toshiba hdd.
I use smart once in a while to check my devices health. It's truly a great software to use to check if your drives are indeed failing. Gnome disks has a great smart tool. 🙂
I've had a few go tts up on me, until I learned to heed the clicking or files, folders, or the drive foreshadowing by temporarily disappearing or being unavailable. If those things happen, you better move anything you don't want to lose to a good drive.
Another good place for buying used drives: building a NAS or some other RAID array. The drives could last for years no issues, but being in a RAID, one or two drives failing (depending on your setup) is not a big deal, and can still be a net savings on the initial build (even if annoying).
I had a HD I had been using from 2007 all the way till 2016. It would often fail to boot and be recognized by the BIOS, so I had to unscrew everything, clean the contacts that had gone brown, and put it all back together for it to work again, but after a few more boots, it would present the same issue again and the process had to be repeated. Constantly overheating, so I had to put a desk fan at max speed pointed specifically at the HD to be able to use it at normal temperatures. It was a, as we say it in Brazil, "gambiarra" to make it work. Needless to say, I'm not going back to HDs, no matter how cheap they have become. It's SSDs or nothing for me now!
My 2TB hard drive I bought from Newegg came in a big cardboard box with NO padding whatsoever. I’m wondering if I should’ve returned it now… It could done a barrel roll in the box if it was thrown hard enough, and nothing would’ve stopped it.
Dying hard drive? More like “Dude, watching these videos makes me feel alive!” I simply love how LTT provides us with so much useful and fascinating information.
I had a 2.5 inch HDD die in a laptop when (what I suspect) a ball bearing in the spindle motor destroyed itself, I used the freezer trick and got some of the data off it, but I only got some, the rest wasn't worth the cost of sending it to a data recovery place. Since then I have always had mirrored drives in my systems. I know it's not a perfect solution and 3-2-1 should be practiced, but I figure at least mirroring is better than nothing. I also had an early SSD die on me due to the wear leveling not being super advanced, luckily all that had on it was the OS and a swap to a new SSD had me up and running again, all my important data still safe on the mirrored HDD's.
I was thinking about georedundancy of my data on my NAS. Local data redundancy has been taken care of by having the 4x3TB drives in a RAID 5 array, but I'm considering an off-site backup as well, but most likely on a single 8TB drive (since I have an unused single drive bay NAS). My worst data loss by a failing hard drive was in 2001 or so. Back in the day I couldn't afford a CD burner, but a friend of mine had one. So I would take out my WD Caviar 21600 (1.6GB two platter drive) and take it to him, with one or two folders prepared to be burnt as CDs. One day I almost got hit by a car, and as I jumped away from the car approaching me, I managed to drop the drive. First, about half of the drive died, then the half of the remaining half, and that's when I replaced it with a shiny new 20GB Maxtor.
Wish you'd added info to this video about the 'defect spare list' table used for bad block reallocation. It is typically 5% of the drive capacity and is one of the main reasons your 1TB drive comes out to ~947GB. Another part of that total loss is the mebibyte/megabyte issue, commonly referred to as 'marketing math'. Bad block reallocation is normal because *infrequent* bad blocks are normal. If they occur too fast, too frequently or if the defect spare list is full, the drive will go into SMART failure. SMART failure can occur for other reasons, but these are the most common. Firmware bugs can cause drive hangs and bad blocks (which can influence the SMART threshold tables), so keeping firmware updated when bugs are found is a good idea. Once a drive goes into SMART failure, there is no way to clear it (without manufacturer tools). Do firmware updates as preventative maintenance.
is the "freezer technique" (drive in a vacuum bag, and an entire day ...yeah: in the freezer) still used to get "the last full read" on a partition from thermal stress failed drives (classic 7200rpm sitting basically on idle for years on an always on pc at an avg temp of 40 to 50C.. metal parts tends to expand and stay expanded, so you use cold to realign them a bit and ultimately temporarily recover moving parts mobility on the disk)? I saved hundreds of partitions thanks to this trick in the last 25 years.
Pretty funny you guys upload this days after I was very near losing some really important data because I had it on a hard drive without backup. I have a NAS with redundancy and a cloud backup.
The same can be said for SSDs. The moment it has begun its use, it is on the slow path to failure. NAND flash has a limited write cycle count that only gets worse as more layers are added, and there are many electronic components that can fail on an SSD as they can on an HDD. Recovering an HDD is more likely to be successful though as the only things a person needs are the platters and the small chip that stores info on the specifics of that drive. Everything else can be replaced. An SSD is a LOT more complicated (data is usually spread randomly between chips for wear leveling because of the write cycle issue, can be encrypted, the controller must match, firmware must be the same, etc.). Plain and simple, can't beat them for archival storage unless you go to magnetic tapes.
thanks for the video. I was worried about my hardrive since it started grumbling at me while writing and retrieving data, but now I don't need to worry about it.
Awesome video would be really cool to see more troubleshooting tips for commonish issues "is you're pc randomly crashing? Here is 10 ways to troubleshoot" I'll be expecting the SSD sequel shortly 👌
In my experience, if S.M.A.R.T. is giving you a fail... consider failure eminent. And any warning or failure on the reallocated sector count is a "get the data off and replace" scenario... if you care about the data on it. I've had pretty good luck with HDD's. Though I have lost data in the past, and thus I have SyncBack set to run on a regular basis. Always have a backup. I've had to tell more than enough people bad news that their data wasn't recoverable, and the only way to recover it would be VERY expensive. And a tip on that, if you can't recover data in Windows, try Linux. I've had luck with drives that couldn't be read in Windows, being able to read them and get the data off in Linux.
I have the funny case where Samsung’s SSD software keeps warning me of SMART warnings. The SSD in question is still in the PC, however only holding some small games so it wouldnt matter if it failed. The weird part in this, is that the ssd has been going strong for well over 2 years since that warning, and to this way is working fine and not causing any issues, despite still having smart warnings
I've got offsite backups of anything important --- and I've never had an HDD failure (ever). Opened up Crystal Disk Info and found that an old drive I've been hopping between rigs for a long time has 81437 Power On hours. That's 9.29 YEARS of uptime. No idea of what a normal drive lifespan is, but that seems pretty good to me.
Amazing, just amazing... And I'm always baffled to hear about people with no backup, or those keeping all backups at the same locations. Same with people thinking you have no backup or all in one place instead of 3-4 different locations/old friends.
A pro-tip for Linux. If there are read or write errors, the drive is immediately remounted to be read-only. if you ever see this happen, it's a good sign that you should be backing up everything on there immediately (if you haven't already) and consider replacing it.
I've lost many hard drives, and I have also lost discs I sent in for recovery because of return mail routing chaos! Nothing quite like losing data, make sure you back up everything
Six years ago, my 2tb drive wouldn't spin up. Stuck it in the freezer for an hour, and it's been working great ever since. My Hitachi drives are 11 years old and still going strong, they're the best in the business!
I have had bad luck with the WD Black series on them catching fire within five minutes...nearly as long as a Gigabyte power supply doing the same... With all the RMAs and contact with a family friend working in their Irvine branch at the time... The latter actually saw this happen out of the box after having dinner with my family... Within a week...a recall took place...
Or you just buy 2 big drives Use 1 daily and the other as back up. And update the backup every few months. When the daily drive dies you can use the back up as daily. And then buy another and do the same. Its stress free
Gsmartcontrol on linux indicated old age, and pre-failiure, with several errors recorded. Not only that, the computer was showing symptoms of slow loading, even just to open up the start menu. This was observed in contrast to booting up with a usb stick, and with that hard disk running manjaro xcfe. Yes, I was uncomfortable. Also another good way to harass a hard drive, is to get a tv tray stand, deep carpet, and have the hard drive in the laptop. All that's left is to bounce it with one foot.
I would also like to note, all harddrives are different... Recently upgraded my old raid-6 array, after 8 years of having WD reds in them. My previous array existed from 6 x 3TB WD reds at 5400 RPM. The new array exists out of 6 x 18TB WD ultrastar dc hc550 at 7200RPM. Those ultrastar drives sound like they're broken at their core, if I compare them to my 8 year old silent WD reds. It's apparently perfectly normal for enterprise drives to be "a bit more noisy", making a heavy 'thonk' when they spin up... I've been happy this far with my new ultrastar drives, the noise isn't really an issue for me...
what's weird is that i've never seen a smart warning in my life but my brother has. multiple times. usually for me i'll break my drive (by dropping it or something) before it fails due to smart errors. no idea why drives go from good to warning in that case - just time? overusage?
Had one drive fail with some important stuff. Done backups regularly since. A tip, if you have a warranty dont go to the store first thing like I did. They took my drive, tossed in the trash and gave me a new one before I could say anything. Didnt even ask if I had something on it.
I remember having my harddrive die on me when I was maybe like 15. It was like 3 am and I was working on some of my music when it happened and I thought I lost everything and just started crying. I had years of writing, pictures and so much more on that drive and when it failed it made my heart break. Luckily the data was salvageable but ever since that incident I have been super careful with backups and cloud storage on all of my devices. Never wanna go through something like that again.
I should call her.
I'm glad at the very least that all my pictures and most of my important data has been backed up to the cloud and locally is on SSDs now. I still have a single, used, 500GB HDD in my machine that is more just for random videos I've made or other not really needed files.
my internet is too bad for cloud storage lol, germany is assbackwards when it comes to internet.
@D never read better words in my life lol. Aussie internet is 100000% worse than almost any country out there. Even the average school network connection per user is like 2mbps, in the US that would be at least 20. Australians have it harder than alot of people when it comes to internet.
i'm used to lost TeraBytes of data, poor internet speed for cloud storage backup **sigh*
My best tale for data recovery comes from my early teens. I was 1. Dumb, 2. Not financially stable, and 3. DUMB. I was able to totally recover all of my data from an old 60GB drive with a combination of a week of time, a freezer, and lots of attempts with ddrescue. I was ultimately able to get a bit-accurate image, and restored it to another junky drive from a recycling pull... That promptly died as well. And what was I trying to save? Some old game repacks that took a long time to download over dialup. Just had to save that copy of UT2K4. The good ol' days.
UT2k4 is worth saving brother. A good save.
I saved UT2K4 when formatting HDD even tho I had it on my disc. That game is worth saving on multiple backups.
Woah! DDRescue is older than I expected
I find it a shame that these days many channels use video titles that aren't at all descriptive of what the video is about. I typically don't bother clicking. This video's topic is especially interesting and I'm lucky I clicked on it.
That's for the algorithm and click bait reasons. On floatplane the LTT video names are completely dry and descriptive
LTT at least have some kind of identifier in the thumbnail. Jayz2cents on the other hand..
They usually change it in like a week for a more useful title
Yes, I know it's for the algorithm. I usually make it a point not to click videos like this. My actions are only a drop in the bucket, but if everyone followed suit we could change the algorithm/tactic.
Regarding the comment about Jay - I agree, he's become worse and I stopped watching his videos. I try and support creators that don't bow to poor tactics such as Gamers Nexus and L1.
“Failure is not an option” and the thumbnail is Anthony with a hard drive… I’m going to assume this video is about hard drive failure.
I love it when you mention the Floppotron, this is where old HDD & FDD go to their 2nd life as a musical instrument.
Floppotron is beautiful =)
For its age, the original hard drive in my oldest laptop still works fine with no bad sectors. Its a Toshiba Satellite 330 CDS from 1998 with its original 4 gb hard drive. Not bad that it still works fine even after almost 24 years since it was made and I have it running Windows 98 second edition.
Make sure to remove the backup batteries from under the keyboard. When they leak they can destroy the mainboard.
how much on-time? that is the main contributor to hard drive aging
What does bad sectors mean?
@@FreakyCh3rry it means an area of a hard disk platter that is damaged physically, either by contaminants getting into the drive of the head scratching the platter due to the hard disk being handled too rough.
Mine, 1to from 2013, I got with my first dead HP laptop, that I putted on my PS3, died a long time ago
A good tip to hearing a drive even in a case with fans going. is a non-magnetic screwdriver. rest the tip of the driver (bigger the better) on the drive surface gently and put the handle in your ear... the sound travels up the driver and you can hear it. even in a server with multiple drives. Do not impale yourself!
Instructions unclear. Perforated my ear ball.
classic technique used by mechanics too. helps you zero in on clicking noises when an engine is making all sorts of racket everywhere else.
You should specify non-magnetic screwdriver.
@@Dylan-zm3ht tried and true method. Also throwing it against the wall really hard to see if it falls apart helps
@@nathanlowery1141 drilling holes into it helps you take a peek inside!
“Failure is always an option!” -Adam Savage
YES!
"keep it in the family" - Adam savage
@@nickkk420 That’s what they call “puppy love from the same litter.”
Now i need that crossover "LTT build a NAS for Adam Savage"
@@IngeniebrioCivil LTT x Tested? I think getting Adam and Alex talking, and maybe Norm with Linus, would be so cool!!
This is a great video! I hope LTT does more like this, signs of SSD failure, fan failure, etc...
That may be one of the lab functions
161 000 views in the first 2 hours is catastrophic for a channel this large, so they probably won't.
@@tspooner01 Yes and no. The newer systems have fans that don't spin all the time or will spin slowly. This is also a sign that the fans are failing. I did have one fail though and I was able to tell because that particular fan never came on even when the others were screaming along at the highest RPM. Poking the fan with a small plastic stirrer resulted in the fan spinning up, which means the motor or bearings are failing.
If the fan makes noise though, that's a bit different.
SSD failure is usually gradual unless the controller just gives up in one go, where you can't tell that will happen outside of knowing that the product line is faulty.
Otherwise things like flash exhaustion the SSD will report, and Windows will notify the user that there is an issue (Windows checks SMART stats).
@@Clavichordist easy enough, install speed fan or adjust the fan curve in the bios, see if it spins up. If you need to check the actual rpm, tachometers are like $30, though don't think you'll get a case where it won't be whining if fan bearing is coming loose, so checking the actual RPM doesn't really make sense.
Many years ago I had two 80gig hard drives in raid 0 for OS, apps, and a lot of personal files. One of them started squeaking, but I ignored it. Then one day it made a sound like a shovel being dragged across concrete and died. Nothing was recoverable, and I learned some valuable lessons.
I've had pretty good luck with high capacity refurbished enterprise drives for my home NAS. As long as you buy from a reputable vendor (read: not ebay) they'll have some sort of warranty and easy(ish) return policy.
what are some reputable vendors?
Please list some resellers 😁
Nothing wrong with eBay, just have to double check it comes with a warranty from the company and it's a reputable seller and not 60 year old Jim from IT selling random drives out his closet.
@@thiefrules I like Server Supply for used drives, but if you are wanting to roll the dice, Amazon and Newegg Marketplace often have used drives for sale. Just make sure you get some kind of warranty, erase the entire drive as step one (to protect yourself), and then run a full smart diagnostic (to check or bad sectors), follow by benchmarks (to make sure the drive isn't crap performance like a dying drive often is). Return any drive with bad, reallocated, or unstable sectors.
@@thiefrules all my refurbished drives came with fresh 3-5 years warranty from Western Digital... ..
Actually had a drive issue very recently. Turned out my harddrive was getting oddly warm and caused it to crash everytime i was gaming off of it. Cleaned my pc, upgraded cooling, no more crashing, no event viewer logs
Getting too hot can cause long-term damage to a harddrive as well (I've killed a couple like this), so I'd recommend making sure everything is backed up right now, and replace the drive when you can.
I used to work for a PC warranty place (early-to-mid 2000s) and in our engineers handbook we literally had 'lift the PC 2 inches off the ground and drop' as the official solution to resolve a stuck hard drive (when the head keeps clicking rather than reading/parking). I remember thinking it was a bit odd but when one of my hard drives got stuck I did it and it worked (took two drops though). Of course I ordered a new hard drive and transferred the data because I knew I'd have caused some surface damage to the platters but I couldn't have got my data (without one of those super expensive data recovery companies) without that maneuverer and would have lost everything. Sometimes mechanical issues require mechanical solutions, not saying it works every time but it's def worth a go before spending money on a data recovery service.
My mother worked in IT and this was a legit solution at her work. (It was the easier version of opening the computer taking the hard drive out and slinging it, which was the earlier fix.)
NO it's definitely not worth a go! You could cause irreversible data loss, when it's otherwise intact. If you have valuable data, never risk it.
I'd assume it works due to the stepper motor getting stuck, and the shock of the fall allowing it to move again.
@@Twisterhere what good is the data if it's stored on a paper weight? And if the data was so "valuable" you wouldn't even consider this anyways.
@@foodhatesme You're calling a hard drives paper weights? And no it's not caused by a stepper motor, stuck heads are caused by numerous things such as dirt/lube build up, shock damage, failed pre-amps.
Out of literally thousands of drive failures I have seen over the years, I have only ever seen S.M.A.R.T detect a problem on 2 drives that I didn't already know were failing. I have also had drives that S.M.A.R.T condemned very early on in life last for 5-6 additional years without any issue so I don't really trust S.M.A.R.T data for anything other than a quick gauge to see what the drive has been through and potential physical issues it may already be suffering from.
Agree, HDDs have the tendency of sometimes just.. fail spontaneously.
Aaah the good ol' clicking noise.
Read Error Scans are our best friends. It takes time, but it's much more reliable, in my experience
i have some drive tester with that on my desktop ive had since april 2021, the hdd is still at "100% health" while the ssd has decreased to 96% in 17 months, i have no idea how its possible
@@Rhyean2004 Drive SSD health is based on how many writes you have done.
If you're writing, erasing, etc.. is going to reduce it quickly.
On the good side compared to HDDS.. HDDS can die instantly with no way to recover from one day to another (clicking problem). While SSDs usually degrade until they are do not allow you to write anymore, but your data can be still recovered.
You must be much better than the average techie at identifying issues then. I also have had SMART detect two failing drives (that later would fail), but in my case I've only had 4 of my drives fail in my life, and the first two were before I knew anything about computers. (a couple weeks old Samsung 1.5TB and an aging Maxtor 120GB)
As for drives it detected that would later die, I only remember the story of one of them. I picked up two Seagate 500GB drives I saw laying on the concrete next to a dumpster. Both of them had reallocated sectors but were virtually unused. One of them got worse quickly and ended up dying, the other kept working until I no longer needed it. I think they were old spares from a company that they literally tossed out (looked clean & near-pristine)
I've always found it odd that none of the drives I've used have ever failed. I still use an external drive my dad bought like almost 15 years ago for himself and it still works and only had 3 bad sectors last time I checked.
All my IDE drives from the 1980s and 1990s eventually croaked by the end of the 2000s. My 2000s drives all died, too. But everything I've had since the 2010s has been surviving. My oldest working drives now began use in 2012.
In my machine I use most, I've got two drives from 2018 that seem to be working... although, since June, the 2018 mechanical has been making a clockbeat rhythm and I'm unsure why. I'll load it up in BIOS soon and see if it's doing it there, too. I can easily sustain the loss, and it's a smaller capacity single terrabyte drive. If it's making the sounds in BIOS after I reseat the drives in the drive bay, and all the cables, then I suppose that's fine. I was intending to replace the drive anyway in the near future.
I think you're right, Aki. My experience with modern junk is that it's great, at least compared to the old IDE drives. LOL Those things are dinosaur tech.
I have a drive from 2006 that still appears to be working as of less than a year ago. I haven't used it recently, but I wouldn't be surprised if it still works. I've been fortunate so far as well and have never seen a hard drive fail either. Believe it or not, I've had RAM fail on me before. Very weird odds of what I've seen if you ask me.
Fun video, Having experienced plenty of hardware failures on all kinds of storage due to work and my own personal storage at home, I'm probably never beyond 200 feet of a failing or failed hard drive. I say this because the video came up and I was just looking at a box with 5 untested hard drives. Certainly helped pass the time while I check them before backing up anything salvageable off them.
S.M.A.R.T. tracking is the only tracking i support with no questions. It can tell you how many hours the drive has been powered on and each time it has been turned to park or stopped as well as what Anthony mentioned.
You can also initiate SMART self-tests with smartmontools that are both OS-independent and log the results to the drive's internal SMART self-test log. Whenever I get a new magnetic drive, first thing I do is a selective test across the whole surface (smartctl -t select,0-max) so that if a new drive arrives with any bad sectors, it goes straight back to the vendor for replacement, and the drive is basically blighted at that point because the self-test results are baked into the drive's self-test log.
I recently ordered a 4tb Exos drive that was advertised as brand new, after opening it, i immediately knew that it was pre-owned so I fired up CrystalDiskInfo and lo and behold, it had been powered on for 36000 hours and only powered on 24 times. Thankfully, the seller was willing to give a refund so it all worked out. Thank god for SMART.
@@dirg3music I've had some drives where the CrystalDiskInfo stats just don't make sense. Such as those numbers you describe. What situation would a drive only be booted some two dozen times for over 30k hours?
@@FlyboyHelosim Servers.
I have a few dozen drives running that have over 55'000h of run time, and where only powered on 3-4 times.
(mind you, Seagate Exos drives are enterprise drives)
@@RobinCernyMitSuffix Yeah, sure. Except I don't have any server hard drives. The scenario I talked about applies to consumer-grade hard drives taken out of laptops. I've also noticed erroneous numbers linked to hard drives taken out of things like Sky TV boxes.
Yes it is. Failure is always an option.
Failure is my only option.
I wanna fail :(
I AM failure, so my options are limited
@@elijahdiaz5914 Already wrote that, so you failed 😝
Drives sometimes do operations that aren't transperant to the viewer that could be mistaken as failure. I believe some have to do with getting rid of stiction for instance.
The usual first sign of a magnetic drive on its way out due to substrate failure is when Windows throws a delayed write failed error. You might also get loads of errors in the SMART error log. That's the point where you should already have made backups, and if not, get the most critical shit copied off ASAP because the drive isn't likely to survive the day. I've had several hard drives go out this way, and the fun part is that the failures are predictable months in advance if you do sequential read tests of the whole drive and you have sections where the read speed drops through the floor, as those are areas where the substrate is already failing, but hasn't quite gone completely dead yet.
Thanks big dog, mi NAS se jodieron dos discos así con 8Tb. Dammm
Victoria HDD/SSD is the tool of choice for me. It's free and has a lot more information and indications of a bad drive. You can even find out if the sectors are weak (but not dead yet).
Sweet. Nice find
Victoria is good (works really good on old win 9x systems)
Can I get it without going to shady third party websites (Softonic for example) or a Russian website?
@@LazyJesse Well, somebody put it on Chocolatey, so why not use that?
@@CotyRiddle It got new updates in the last couple of years and now it also works much better on more modern operating system.
Hah, back in high school (almost 20 years ago...) my dad's work laptop died due to a seized drive... opened that sucker up in the cleanest area of the house, poked the spindle, sealed it back up, and used that drive and laptop as a server for four years. I only retired it because I wanted a more powerful machine. Sometimes these machines can surprise you.
You got lucky. Next time use a laminar flow hood. Any dust can murder a drive and there are millions if not billions of dust particles in a clean home.
10min video with 2 mins of self promotions/sponsors/unrelated content, you make 5 of these a week each containing 20% ads and you get a full video of nothing but ads, remember guys we allowed this to be a standard
Ok?
I know right! They shouldn't be able to make money with sponsors, they should be making all this amazing content for free, they're so rude trying to make money in order to keep making amazing content for us, they're so selfish.
Also note that this video had me skip the ad with one 5 seconds skip so calm down bud
The production quality is actually mind blowing. Especially when you consider how much content they release daily
Had a few failures over my years. Most were insignificant. Only one was slightly significant as it was a failure of one of my servers HDD's. Thanks to the combo of zfs and zed I got an email about the failure while I was sitting in school (this is several years back now) so I was able to just pick up a replacement drive on my walk back home and swap it in.
What a coincidence! I was already running a SMART test of my hard drives 15 minutes before I saw this video ---btw DriveDX is a very good software option for Mac users
samee
Anthony: The hero we never knew we needed, dont deserve, but is always there to save out butts from certain doom. Thank you.
did your hard drive die?🤣
As an IT guy, having experienced firsthand how unreliable spinning rust is, my instinct when someone asks me this question is to always reply with, 'yes, yes it probably is.' You can never trust hard drives, especially consumer level stuff (laptops/external drives etc).
I have hard drives from the 90s that still work completely fine even after heavy tests. I don't get it.
Well, also as an 'IT guy', I still put my trust in hard drives more than any other form of storage medium.
yeah they just die and die and die. SSDs have proven soo much more reliable for me. 50% of the hard disks my family and I have used have died, yet only two SSDs have died so far. One being a 2011 OCZ SSD that became well-known for being unreliable, and the other the cheapest SSD I ever bought, which died in the first 2 weeks. I personally use my SSDs very heavily and like to run them in RAID0 (I know..)
@@HazewinDog wtf kind of hdds are you buying? Are you throwing them around? I've never had an HDD die on me in decades of working with them.
@@n646n Same. Never experienced a hard drive failure within 20 years of using computers. Many second hand purchases. Cheap flash drives on the other hand
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for this video. I am old enough that I should definitely know better.
Your vid prompted me to check my only remaining HDD status. Got 'Pred Fail' and found loads of bad block errors.
Replaced with a 1TB SDD. Thank you Anthony!
2:14 High-capacity drives (10+TB) seem to perform self-checks that might also result in extra sounds.
What a coincidence that this video shows up couple days after I noticed that my oldest (7 years) SSD has been throwing up Event ID 7 (bad block) messages on Event Viewer for months. Weirdly it's failing sooner than my 11-year-old HDD. Hopefully you'll make that SSD version of this video soon 😅
Samsung SDD from early 2021? RMA it, these are known factory defects on models from January to April 2021. You will get a new one that doesn't age prematurely.
@@Grocel512 SSD in question is Samsung 850 Evo from 2015 so no RMA but I have to keep your comment in mind and check my Samsung 970s which I bought in 2021, they might be from that batch even though they still work perfectly.
@@Fortzon You should be fine then. The nvme products were not affected. If you had a SATA 870 EVO 2TB or 4TB you would have to watch out for ECC error rate and unrecoverable error rates. I had an affected unit (4TB) that I RMA'ed.
I've bought 4 "New Pull" HDDs over the span of 6 years and only one of them has failed 6 months ago, but granted it was the older one I bought. I'd say it's pretty safe to buy these types of drives, I've had OEM HDDs -especially from HP PC's and laptops- fail much faster (and way harder) than these used ones. Obviously YMMV, but I'd still say these types of drives are a pretty good deal IMO.
Meanwhile a friends dad had a hard drive with increasingly bad sectors, a semi broken MBR and no backup.
As soon as we found the issue we made a backup, but yet he still went on and did all of his work on that very drive for another two years.
Until his outlook database got struck. The recovery program didn't want to recover the files and he didn't save the correct file.
Luckily cloning the drive with ddrescue and repairing the database on the clone was possible and all of his work of the past 6 months was saved.
The new hard drive hasn't shown any issues so far, but the file system is still the same, so we are now trying to get away from that machine and sort all the data accumulated over the last 10 years as soon as he has another system to work with. Hopefully with a better backup strategy
This is very relevant to my interests as I've got a bunch of old hard drives I recently put into a computer after years of sitting idle and I want to see if they are healthy.
You never adressed what to do with a broken HDD. Do I just throw it away in the bin?
I recently had a Seagate Exos 16TB die on me, i only had it for half a year so luckily i can count on the warranty.
It made weird noises and windows didn't initialise the disk anymore.
When i managed to initialise the disk and ran a surface test it showed loads of bad clusters too.
16TB of data.. gone..
This video came at the right time to remind me to A.Finish cleaning up (and moving data off) the old HDD I have (I bought more SSD and now I don't need this old HDD anymore, especially since its probably more than 10 years old) and B.Once that's done, do a full backup.
Last winter the NVME M.2 SSD on my laptop died for no reason, and it took a week to find a data recovery company and then 1.5 months to do recovery + 2 months to bring in order what has been recovered. After that day I always create backups on external drives, on a regular basis :)
How much did it cost?
@@LummyTum Back then it costed me 15,000 roubles (198 usd at the exchange rate of those days).
SMART is (in my experience) totally unreliable. Disks die without ever giving an early warning through SMART. I just don't think hard drive vendors want to tell the customer that the disk is failing because they don't want warranty repairs, so it is not in their interest to signal early failure... Just treat disks as unreliable things and have a backup. No point in trying to predict anything here, really.
Nailed it
How would you expect smart to report on mechanical failures?
I just wish there was a solid program that could actually interpret the individual SMART values without needing background in what they each mean. Past CrystalDiskInfo's "Good/Caution/Fail" that is.
Probably in a world of how it used to be, but I have long been a massive fan of Spinrite. Has recovered more than a few hardrives and data that was otherwise considered too bad to recover.
My first hard drive still works, I can't put it in anything anymore, but it still works. I have most of my old drives in external enclosures and check them once in a while and they're all still good. The only drive I've ever had fail on me was because I accidentally scraped a component off the exposed board but it only had games on it so I didn't need to recover anything from it.
(This is early onset) If you are noticing any errors what so ever. there is another option... after your diagnostics have shown there is a drive failure. You can use "HDD regenerator" this can potentially move information on bad sectors to un-allocated sectors... once completed a windows health check is needed through command prompt outside windows "chkdsk /f /r" ... once completed the drive should be repaired to an extent(data wise).... use a clone program to clone the data from the bad drive to a new drive. Hope this helps
Dios mio! La creatura!
The fact this video got recommended to me right after my hard drive just died
So I got my Seagate Constellation ISE 2TB back in 2012, and its been running as my Main Data for years, online, nearly 24/7 without any shutdown. In 2019 it still had a 10/10 SMART reading. I still use my 2TB COnstellation as a high speed HDD archieve (nothing important, just stuff I dont want to delete or I dont run for a while and move it off my M.2 NVME).
Today its still 10/10 SMART with the same parameters I get in all check disk and disk health programs since 2012, 2015, 2019 and 2022.
According to a decade of extensive testing by Google across its millions of datacentre drives, SMART is not a reliable, or even unreliable, measure of the health of a hard drive. What boggles my mind is that the two of the three most reliable measures are completely ignored: sound and latency. Sound is mostly indicative of bearing wear, though it also speaks to behaviour which SMART should be reporting if it's problematic, ie uncorrectable error rate, which leads to... Higher latency is by far the most important metric. As a drive ages it has an increased media error rate, and that leads to it re-reading blocks and after a simple re-read fails - re-calibrating. It's the re-calibrating that is the most obvious audible behaviour change with an unhealthy drive. The latency is easy to ignore, but you do so at your peril. Lastly, spin-up duration is also indicative of both bearing health and media health. In a sane world the OS would be keeping stats for how long spin-up takes, and when a trend towards longer duration is established, the drive should be powered off and you should be warned to duplicate it in read-only mode before its imminent demise. SMART record, but not log, spin-up time. Out of context of past behaviour it's nearly meaningless.
Yep shoddy video
They do talk about sound though
i actually have CrystalDiskInfo running in the background all the time and it notifies me if a problem has started with the HDD and fun fact: my (my old) Hearing aids have a t-coil mode that i can use to listen to the electrical signals coming off of the hard drive and i can tell if something is wrong with it...
As someone who's expanding a plex server and is thinking about going WD gold (i was outgrowing my space quickly before, and needed a drive, so went external, and going to use those for cold backup. Mind you, I'm running 51tb on my server, a 1tb ssd and 50tb of HDDs for plex). But I'd love to see an in depth talk about different "trim levels" of hard drives, across both WD and Seagate, especially covering how Gold might or might not be worth the money.
I am screenshotting 0:12 and making it my desktop background
Can’t you use SSDs as relatively large-scale storage for home use, or is it more expensive?
SSDs have very limited write cycles, and it eventually dies when written to so many times. So while it theoretically have a long read-only life cycle, it’s not always the use-case.
SSDs are exponentially more expensive. a 20TB HDD costs about the same as an 8TB SSD. So if you have money to burn...
Uh I feel like I've read that SSD's being unpowered for EXTENDED lengths can lose data.
Good ones are between 4 to 8 times more expensive for the same storage and have a limited number of write times that is significantly inferior to what an HDD can bring to the table.
Sure, and that's probably the recommended strategy for most uses just because of power consumption, which I'm very conscious of during this heatwave. That having been said, it gets expensive when your storage demands exceed about 4 terabytes.
I was going to buy an external hdd at my go to pc shop, also got some ram and asked for regular 3.5 hdds, the guy just handed me free 500gb hdds, got 4 of them for free, now i have 2tb of free storage, and i use it for backup! They were used on old servers, but were from 2014-2015, i got there in 2019, so i thought what the hell, they are free, lets try them out, still safely saving my music and photos till this day, shout out *undisclosed* pc shop! Your services were simply the best!
For more than a decade I have used a multi-tier mirroring backup strategy. So far I've never lost anything.
Every computer in my home has a Data drive where the files are stored, I never use the OS drive for data, and that Data drive has a DataBackup Robocopy Mirror drive in the same case.
Then every computer has TWO external hard drives that the Data drive is also Robocopy mirrored to.
Then I have a NAS that has 32TB in it that every computer is also Robocopy mirrored to.
And finally, I have a large Google Drive where my most important files are backed up to.
I also have all of my code on a Microsoft Azure repository for an additional backup of my software development.
Using Robocopy scripts means that I can quickly double click on a batch file to perform any of the required backups to any of the destination devices.
my 16 year old hdd works
I grew up on the sounds of the WD Caviar HDDs during the 1990s, and they still make those sounds today, just quieter.
The initial title was so non descriptive. I’m glad they hanged it and I semi guessed what the video was about based on the thumbnail and the fact that Anthony was in it.
It's funny, literally yesterday my 13 year old 1tb Drive just died
Holyyy, the boys oldd
@@RiadRiad yep, it was the oldest drive. Fortunately I've got a couple cold spares so it was a quick replacement
RIP Anthony.. I'm going to miss him.
My Hitachi Deathstar 80GB drives had this nifty self-test thing they'd do at roughly 1h45min intervals where you'd hear a series of whines at different pitches, and a click or two, before it'd go silent again. The first time I heard mine do this I was mortified at the thought of my brand-new drive already failing - especially since when I was using my mom's computer which had its batch-mate installed I noticed that drive did the same thing.
Later I learned it was part of the drive's self-testing functionality, and I actually began enjoying the cute little hums/whines and clicks it would make.
Thank you by telling me about crystal disc info you helped me save half of my data from failing with that device but it’s safe now because I’m trans ported it to my other healthy disc thanks so much
RIP Anthony
I want Anthony to take my hard drive for a test drive
I want Anthony to take me for a drive.. WAIT THAT SOUNDS wrooong
My drive began taking longer to boot like half an hour just to boot from off and just yesterday it got to an hour and a half. No weird noises just out of nowhere got that bad. Ended up making an exact copy of the drive to my SSD that just had games on it and wow is it lightning fast now. I plan to replace my secondary drive with an SSD and replace the game one that’s now being used for OS. The old drive was 5 years old.
From working at a PC store during high school and dealing with 20+ broken hard drives during these times, I can say that CrystalDiskInfo under Windows and "Pending Sector Count" and "Reallocated Sectors" are the best signs of immediate failure. For everything above 0, prepare to immediately save your data and replace the drive. It usually also already triggers "WARNING" in CrystalDiskInfo, which means your drive is about to bust. In comparison, that self-test and stuff are not that relevant imo, they are pretty useless and say "okay" way too often on broken drives.
Gosh I miss to see new videos where Emily appears, so smart person.
Man I miss Emily...
It’s good to see Anthony again. Great stuff.
I remember my wife's laptop drive crapped out and started clicking. Her laptop got super slow and kept hanging. She freaked out when I took it apart and put it in the freezer. In hindsight, I should have put it in a ziplock first, but it still worked out fine. Managed to get it recognized again and moved the important stuff to an SSD.
What's funny about it all is years later, when building my first TrueNAS, I pulled it out of storage and threw it in a mirror with some other old drives, and it has zero bad sectors and stopped clicking. Lol.
Edit: And like the other amazing claims on here, yes, it's an old Toshiba hdd.
I use smart once in a while to check my devices health. It's truly a great software to use to check if your drives are indeed failing. Gnome disks has a great smart tool. 🙂
I've had a few go tts up on me, until I learned to heed the clicking or files, folders, or the drive foreshadowing by temporarily disappearing or being unavailable. If those things happen, you better move anything you don't want to lose to a good drive.
90 dollars for a hoodie!? 2 weeks ago I bought a full suit from brooks brothers for 84 dollars. They even gave 2 ties for free
Fantastic timing! My grandfather has a drive with the tick of death. Need to ask if he wants to get the data recovered.
I lost my main storage drive to a read head failure only 2 days ago. Your timing couldn't be more perfect to rub salt in the wound!
I guess, according to 2:40, no one else at LTT may ever say where to buy the hoodie ever again! Checkmate, mwahaha
Another good place for buying used drives: building a NAS or some other RAID array. The drives could last for years no issues, but being in a RAID, one or two drives failing (depending on your setup) is not a big deal, and can still be a net savings on the initial build (even if annoying).
I had a HD I had been using from 2007 all the way till 2016. It would often fail to boot and be recognized by the BIOS, so I had to unscrew everything, clean the contacts that had gone brown, and put it all back together for it to work again, but after a few more boots, it would present the same issue again and the process had to be repeated. Constantly overheating, so I had to put a desk fan at max speed pointed specifically at the HD to be able to use it at normal temperatures. It was a, as we say it in Brazil, "gambiarra" to make it work.
Needless to say, I'm not going back to HDs, no matter how cheap they have become. It's SSDs or nothing for me now!
My 2TB hard drive I bought from Newegg came in a big cardboard box with NO padding whatsoever. I’m wondering if I should’ve returned it now… It could done a barrel roll in the box if it was thrown hard enough, and nothing would’ve stopped it.
Dying hard drive? More like “Dude, watching these videos makes me feel alive!” I simply love how LTT provides us with so much useful and fascinating information.
I had a 2.5 inch HDD die in a laptop when (what I suspect) a ball bearing in the spindle motor destroyed itself, I used the freezer trick and got some of the data off it, but I only got some, the rest wasn't worth the cost of sending it to a data recovery place. Since then I have always had mirrored drives in my systems. I know it's not a perfect solution and 3-2-1 should be practiced, but I figure at least mirroring is better than nothing.
I also had an early SSD die on me due to the wear leveling not being super advanced, luckily all that had on it was the OS and a swap to a new SSD had me up and running again, all my important data still safe on the mirrored HDD's.
I was thinking about georedundancy of my data on my NAS. Local data redundancy has been taken care of by having the 4x3TB drives in a RAID 5 array, but I'm considering an off-site backup as well, but most likely on a single 8TB drive (since I have an unused single drive bay NAS).
My worst data loss by a failing hard drive was in 2001 or so. Back in the day I couldn't afford a CD burner, but a friend of mine had one. So I would take out my WD Caviar 21600 (1.6GB two platter drive) and take it to him, with one or two folders prepared to be burnt as CDs. One day I almost got hit by a car, and as I jumped away from the car approaching me, I managed to drop the drive. First, about half of the drive died, then the half of the remaining half, and that's when I replaced it with a shiny new 20GB Maxtor.
May I suggest telling your program to alert you to changes to SMART status instead of setting a reminder to check yourself.
That was a fun watch even without the information. There were so many little funny Easter eggs and little details
Wish you'd added info to this video about the 'defect spare list' table used for bad block reallocation. It is typically 5% of the drive capacity and is one of the main reasons your 1TB drive comes out to ~947GB. Another part of that total loss is the mebibyte/megabyte issue, commonly referred to as 'marketing math'.
Bad block reallocation is normal because *infrequent* bad blocks are normal. If they occur too fast, too frequently or if the defect spare list is full, the drive will go into SMART failure. SMART failure can occur for other reasons, but these are the most common.
Firmware bugs can cause drive hangs and bad blocks (which can influence the SMART threshold tables), so keeping firmware updated when bugs are found is a good idea. Once a drive goes into SMART failure, there is no way to clear it (without manufacturer tools). Do firmware updates as preventative maintenance.
Ah, a perfect video for you guys to upload a few days after i get my very first cyclic redundancy check error.
is the "freezer technique" (drive in a vacuum bag, and an entire day ...yeah: in the freezer) still used to get "the last full read" on a partition from thermal stress failed drives (classic 7200rpm sitting basically on idle for years on an always on pc at an avg temp of 40 to 50C.. metal parts tends to expand and stay expanded, so you use cold to realign them a bit and ultimately temporarily recover moving parts mobility on the disk)? I saved hundreds of partitions thanks to this trick in the last 25 years.
Pretty funny you guys upload this days after I was very near losing some really important data because I had it on a hard drive without backup. I have a NAS with redundancy and a cloud backup.
The same can be said for SSDs. The moment it has begun its use, it is on the slow path to failure. NAND flash has a limited write cycle count that only gets worse as more layers are added, and there are many electronic components that can fail on an SSD as they can on an HDD. Recovering an HDD is more likely to be successful though as the only things a person needs are the platters and the small chip that stores info on the specifics of that drive. Everything else can be replaced. An SSD is a LOT more complicated (data is usually spread randomly between chips for wear leveling because of the write cycle issue, can be encrypted, the controller must match, firmware must be the same, etc.).
Plain and simple, can't beat them for archival storage unless you go to magnetic tapes.
Would me fully depending on only 1tb SSD be a bad idea?
thanks for the video. I was worried about my hardrive since it started grumbling at me while writing and retrieving data, but now I don't need to worry about it.
Awesome video would be really cool to see more troubleshooting tips for commonish issues "is you're pc randomly crashing? Here is 10 ways to troubleshoot"
I'll be expecting the SSD sequel shortly 👌
In my experience, if S.M.A.R.T. is giving you a fail... consider failure eminent. And any warning or failure on the reallocated sector count is a "get the data off and replace" scenario... if you care about the data on it. I've had pretty good luck with HDD's. Though I have lost data in the past, and thus I have SyncBack set to run on a regular basis. Always have a backup. I've had to tell more than enough people bad news that their data wasn't recoverable, and the only way to recover it would be VERY expensive. And a tip on that, if you can't recover data in Windows, try Linux. I've had luck with drives that couldn't be read in Windows, being able to read them and get the data off in Linux.
I have the funny case where Samsung’s SSD software keeps warning me of SMART warnings. The SSD in question is still in the PC, however only holding some small games so it wouldnt matter if it failed.
The weird part in this, is that the ssd has been going strong for well over 2 years since that warning, and to this way is working fine and not causing any issues, despite still having smart warnings
I've got offsite backups of anything important --- and I've never had an HDD failure (ever). Opened up Crystal Disk Info and found that an old drive I've been hopping between rigs for a long time has 81437 Power On hours. That's 9.29 YEARS of uptime. No idea of what a normal drive lifespan is, but that seems pretty good to me.
Amazing, just amazing... And I'm always baffled to hear about people with no backup, or those keeping all backups at the same locations. Same with people thinking you have no backup or all in one place instead of 3-4 different locations/old friends.
A pro-tip for Linux.
If there are read or write errors, the drive is immediately remounted to be read-only.
if you ever see this happen, it's a good sign that you should be backing up everything on there immediately (if you haven't already) and consider replacing it.
I've lost many hard drives, and I have also lost discs I sent in for recovery because of return mail routing chaos! Nothing quite like losing data, make sure you back up everything
Six years ago, my 2tb drive wouldn't spin up. Stuck it in the freezer for an hour, and it's been working great ever since. My Hitachi drives are 11 years old and still going strong, they're the best in the business!
7:57 shatner esque cadence. nice.
I have had bad luck with the WD Black series on them catching fire within five minutes...nearly as long as a Gigabyte power supply doing the same... With all the RMAs and contact with a family friend working in their Irvine branch at the time... The latter actually saw this happen out of the box after having dinner with my family... Within a week...a recall took place...
Or you just buy 2 big drives
Use 1 daily and the other as back up. And update the backup every few months. When the daily drive dies you can use the back up as daily. And then buy another and do the same. Its stress free
Gsmartcontrol on linux indicated old age, and pre-failiure, with several errors recorded. Not only that, the computer was showing symptoms of slow loading, even just to open up the start menu. This was observed in contrast to booting up with a usb stick, and with that hard disk running manjaro xcfe. Yes, I was uncomfortable. Also another good way to harass a hard drive, is to get a tv tray stand, deep carpet, and have the hard drive in the laptop. All that's left is to bounce it with one foot.
I would also like to note, all harddrives are different...
Recently upgraded my old raid-6 array, after 8 years of having WD reds in them.
My previous array existed from 6 x 3TB WD reds at 5400 RPM.
The new array exists out of 6 x 18TB WD ultrastar dc hc550 at 7200RPM.
Those ultrastar drives sound like they're broken at their core, if I compare them to my 8 year old silent WD reds.
It's apparently perfectly normal for enterprise drives to be "a bit more noisy", making a heavy 'thonk' when they spin up...
I've been happy this far with my new ultrastar drives, the noise isn't really an issue for me...
what's weird is that i've never seen a smart warning in my life but my brother has. multiple times. usually for me i'll break my drive (by dropping it or something) before it fails due to smart errors. no idea why drives go from good to warning in that case - just time? overusage?
Had one drive fail with some important stuff. Done backups regularly since. A tip, if you have a warranty dont go to the store first thing like I did. They took my drive, tossed in the trash and gave me a new one before I could say anything. Didnt even ask if I had something on it.