# Is my external HD knackered ?



## nothing (Feb 12, 2013)

Hi,

I own a 1tb Seagate Desktop external drive. Bought it about 4 years ago and around 6 months in, it started making clicking noises occasionally but I didn't worry too much about this. 

During some routine house keeping, I ran HD Tune over all my drives and got a warning over  the 'Reallocated Sector Count'

Screenshot.  
	

	
	
		
		

		
			





Should I be concerned ?


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## qubit (Feb 12, 2013)

Yes, that's definitely on its way out. In fact, I'm surprised it lasted this long.

It should be replaced.


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## brandonwh64 (Feb 12, 2013)

knackered?


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## Jetster (Feb 12, 2013)

Is it yellow  (cant see pic at work) Then no, Seagate gives warnings in HDtune. At least the ones I have tested. I RMAed a drive and It came back with warnings on 'Reallocated Sector Count' And its still going


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## qubit (Feb 12, 2013)

brandonwh64 said:


> knackered?



Dying / kaput / had it / end of life etc.


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## Jetster (Feb 12, 2013)

Or maybe that. It is 4 years old


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## nothing (Feb 12, 2013)

Thanks for the quick replies. 

Yes, yellow warning:

Reallocated Sector Count
Current: 78 
Worst: 78
Threshold: 36
Data: 915

Quite conflicting answers here just like my Google research. 
Some say it's not too series and others say not to write anything else to the drive and back up everything ASAP as the drive will soon fail.

Well as a precaution I've started copying over the most important data to my ancient Seagate 320gb drive, which I know is working fine.

I was thinking about replacing the drive with this Seagate FreeAgent Desktop-Externaldrive (2tb) from Amazon - does anyone have any thoughts on this drive?


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## Jetster (Feb 12, 2013)

nothing said:


> I was thinking about replacing the drive with this Seagate FreeAgent Desktop-Externaldrive (2tb) from Amazon - does anyone have any thoughts on this drive?



WD External drives are better. At least the back up software works better


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## qubit (Feb 12, 2013)

As far as copying data, one should _always_ have a backup anyway and make them regularly. There's many ways to lose data other than a HDD failure.

In your case, I wouldn't use it for anything important any more and just get a new one.

That Seagate should be ok. Note that I'm going by the brand as I don't have specific experience with that model.


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## Sasqui (Feb 12, 2013)

nothing said:


> Thanks for the quick replies.
> 
> Yes, yellow warning:
> 
> ...



If the warrantee is over and you're sure you got a backup (or two!), you may want to take the drive out and connect directly to the PC and test it.  I have an external drive that I thought was failing and it turned out to be the enclosure, not the drive!


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## Geofrancis (Feb 20, 2013)

If you have nothing on the drive do a full write test to see if its loosing data.


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## itsakjt (Feb 21, 2013)

Reallocated sectors are physically damaged sectors on the platter of the drive itself. Its gonna die soon. Nothing you can do to save it. Just backup your data or you will regret later.


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## silkstone (Feb 21, 2013)

itsakjt said:


> Reallocated sectors are physically damaged sectors on the platter of the drive itself. Its gonna die soon. Nothing you can do to save it. Just backup your data or you will regret later.



I disagree. Here is a drive I bought back from the dead:











Currently using it as a media/backup drive:






HDD regenerator and Vivard brought it back from the dead. And even though it throws up tons of smart errors, it works perfectly.

When i open HD Tune:










When i leave it to update:





I'm guessing there is just an error with the S.M.A.R.T monitor on the HDD now.


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## Aquinus (Feb 21, 2013)

It could be failing, it might not. Run an extended SMART test, if no errors are found you should be fine. Otherwise, rapid degradation of reallocated sector count will imply a failing drive. I have a number of drives with a handful of relocated sectors. It's when you start getting a lot of them quickly is when you want to replace the drive.


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## itsakjt (Feb 21, 2013)

silkstone said:


> I disagree. Here is a drive I bought back from the dead:
> 
> http://img.techpowerup.org/130221/17-December-2012_01-18.png
> 
> ...



It might not fail to you. But once hard disks starts to fail badly, it usually becomes very unreliable. The most important thing is that once the data reach the bad sectors, the data will be at risk also. So its better to be on the safe side and backup all the data and replace the drive.


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## Jetster (Feb 21, 2013)

I have spent countless hours in the past trying to save drives. HD regenerator, Spinrite, defrag programs. Only to have them fail after temporarily breathing life back in. Not one lasted more then a couple weeks. So now I just buy a new. Much easier and less time consuming. A soon as I start getting errors I secure wipe it, sell it and replace


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## silkstone (Feb 21, 2013)

itsakjt said:


> It might not fail to you. But once hard disks starts to fail badly, it usually becomes very unreliable. The most important thing is that once the data reach the bad sectors, the data will be at risk also. So its better to be on the safe side and backup all the data and replace the drive.



The disk has no more bad sectors  and the count on any of the errors has not increased.



Jetster said:


> I have spent countless hours in the past trying to save drives. HD regenerator, Spinrite, defrag programs. Only to have them fail after temporarily breathing life back in. Not one lasted more then a couple weeks. So now I just buy a new. Much easier and less time consuming. A soon as I start getting errors I secure wipe it, sell it and replace



I've been using it daily for the past 3 months and it's still working fine. I won't be using it for any system critical applications. It's basically a spare media drive where i store and seed torrents and a place to keep various backups.

Throwing old hardware away, without even trying to fix it or find a use just seems very wasteful to me.

With HDDs it all depends on the kind of problem you have with your disk, for example if you were to suffer a head crash, then there wouldn't be much you could do to repair the disk, although if the heads weren't damaged you could partition around the damaged area.

The disk that i showed failed due to power-cuts. It would be in the middle of writing a sector and suffer from a power outage. I have a UPS now, so that won;t be a problem any more. The damage has been repaired as far as i can tell. At the moment, it just seems to be the S.M.A.R.T that is knackered, I get normal values when first opening a SMART monitor (most of the time), then leaving it on until it refreshes causes a huge amount of SMART errors.

Not all disks are irreparable once errors occur.


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## Hood (Feb 23, 2013)

nothing said:


> I was thinking about replacing the drive with this Seagate FreeAgent Desktop-Externaldrive (2tb) from Amazon - does anyone have any thoughts on this drive?



I just bought a 2 TB Seagate GoFlex Desk external USB 3.0/2.0 ($99 at Wally World), seems to work great, wrote FLAC backups at around 80 MB/s, and best of all, it doesn't routinely disconnect/reconnect like my Toshiba Canvio 3 TB external (which does it so regularly I believe it's powering down to save juice).  I think that in general the 2 TB drives are more reliable than the 3 TB ones, maybe because they've been around a lot longer for design tweaks/fewer platters.  If the drive is just for backups, it should theoretically last for many years, since it will only be turned on for short periods, and unplugged most of the time.


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## de.das.dude (Feb 23, 2013)

its dead alright. thats a typical seagate type of failure.


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## de.das.dude (Feb 23, 2013)

Hood said:


> I just bought a 2 TB Seagate GoFlex Desk external USB 3.0/2.0 ($99 at Wally World), seems to work great, wrote FLAC backups at around 80 MB/s, and best of all, it doesn't routinely disconnect/reconnect like my Toshiba Canvio 3 TB external (which does it so regularly I believe it's powering down to save juice).  I think that in general the 2 TB drives are more reliable than the 3 TB ones, maybe because they've been around a lot longer for design tweaks/fewer platters.  If the drive is just for backups, it should theoretically last for many years, since it will only be turned on for short periods, and unplugged most of the time.



you can configure your USB ports to not save power by turning off the ports. i think its under power options -> ->chage plan settings->advanced settings->usb settings-> usb selective suspending.


by default its enabled in all the profiles.


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