Question 1TB HDD From 2018

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atif93

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Hello Tom's Hardware, my name is Atif.

I have a HDD from 2018, April WD 1TB. I purchased this to use in my first NAS, however when that died, I put in away for a while and only regularly used it from 2019 to now. It is my main system drive. Recently I have been scanning it using HDD and one red block of >500MS comes up a lot, followed by multiple <500MS green blocks. I don't know what to do, I game a lot should I buy a new hard drive now, so SMART errors are showing, should I buy a HDD customised for gaming? Please Help.

Kind Regards.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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atif93 said:
Hello Tom's Hardware, my name is Atif.

I have a HDD from 2018, April WD 1TB. I purchased this to use in my first NAS, however when that died, I put in away for a while and only regularly used it from 2019 to now. It is my main system drive. Recently I have been scanning it using HDD and one red block of >500MS comes up a lot, followed by multiple <500MS green blocks. I don't know what to do, I game a lot should I buy a new hard drive now, so SMART errors are showing, should I buy a HDD customised for gaming? Please Help.

Kind Regards.
Click to expand...
As has been mentioned multiple times....use it until it dies, or simply becomes too slow.
Then, replace.

Or, replace it now.

AS always, have a known good backup and know how to recover.
 
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atif93

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Sorry, I meant no SMART errors are showing, however there is a lot of disk activity even when idle. I have tried gaming on SSD, however my games are quite a few gigs which an SSD sadly cannot hold.
 
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atif93

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It will take around 17-18 GB, when I had a SSD a lot of my games were writing and reading and that significantly and quickly degraded it's health from 100 to 64% percent very fast. I am vary of SSD.
 
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atif93

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Sir, it wasn't junk it was a Toshiba brand which is one of the biggest names in computing. At the time I only got 240GB to test it out. I do have a budget and can get 1TB to 2TB, but I am wondering whether this will be a good investment considering the read and writes, I know their are durable and fast.
 
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USAFRet

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atif93 said:
Sir, it wasn't junk it was a Toshiba brand which is one of the biggest names in computing. At the time I only got 240GB to test it out. I do have a budget and can get 1TB to 2TB, but I am wondering whether this will be a good investment considering the read and writes, I know their are durable and fast.
Click to expand...
Yes, they are durable.
A 1TB Samsung 860 EVO will work just fine.
 
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atif93

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Okay then, thank you I will keep a lookout for it. I know your saying use the HDD till it dies or until I want to replace it but considering so far from what I have said those <150MS and >500MS green and orange block indicators, what do their show or represent about my HDD health?
 
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atif93 said:
Okay then, thank you I will keep a lookout for it. I know your saying use the HDD till it dies or until I want to replace it but considering so far from what I have said those <150MS and >500MS green and orange block indicators, what do their show or represent about my HDD health?
Click to expand...
Only that it may die at any moment.
Sometime between the next 5 seconds and the next 5 years.

Just like any other hard drive or electronic device.
 
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atif93

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Thanks so much for your help, I think I will probably make this my last HDD purchase now, it just hasn't been great. In just a matter of a few months, I have had 2-3 HDD's stop working. The longest a HDD lasted me was Seagate 3TB, that was from 2017, to end of December 2020, then it conked out, I looked at the HDD and 3TB was read and written, it couldn't take any more.
 
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atif93

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I have all my music, pictures, documents on a NAS, backed up to USB and my good known working SSD, which I removed from my system. I just backed everything up last week.
 
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atif93

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I’m really starting to feel that my HDD will die sometime soon. I now have <150MS over 1,000 blocks. <500MS 58, close to 60 blocks. Over <500MS 1 red block. I have felt the HDD slowing down too, although music and video haven’t glitched yet.
 
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atif93

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You use the HDD could die /crash at anytime, and I may not receive a warning, so is SMART technology not reliable enough then, because I at least should get some warning, but it is seems it’s the calm before the crap storm??
 
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atif93 said:
You use the HDD could die /crash at anytime, and I may not receive a warning, so is SMART technology not reliable enough then, because I at least should get some warning, but it is seems it’s the calm before the crap storm??
Click to expand...
I had a 5 week old 3TB WD drive go from seemingly perfect to dead in 36 hours. It was 5 weeks old.
I had a 960GB Sandisk go from fully working to completely dead in 5 minutes. Powered off....5 minutes later powered up...dead drive. 3 years old, 33 days past the manufacturer warranty.

I said "at any time" for a reason.

You can try to game the lifespan all you want. Drives die, sometimes quite suddenly. Always be prepared for this.
If you're prepared, it doesn't matter what some software tells you, or fails to tell you.
 
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atif93

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Yes, thank you I understand now I guess you said to me, do you have a solid backup in place because if I didn’t, you would have immediately told me to go and make a backup?
 
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atif93 said:
Yes, thank you I understand now I guess you said to me, do you have a solid backup in place because if I didn’t, you would have immediately told me to go and make a backup?
Click to expand...
My procedure is the first post here. A bit modified since then, but that is the basics.
All systems, every drive individually. Weekly, every other day, or nightly, as the particular system dictates.

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