2 year old HDD starting to fail?

[Willium_Bob_Cole]

I bought this 3TB Seagate Barracuda, apparently on 7th Jan 2013 http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B006KCX0UE

The last couple days, it has started to disappear from explorer until I reboot, one time requiring chkdsk at boot, where it found a number of bad sectors, but was able to recover the data and seemed to be okay, but it is conking out randomly still, mid update on steam, or just when left alone for a while.

The drive contains my steam install and games, and with batman Arkham knight rapidly approaching, I don't want it to prevent me from playing, but even with the now reduced price of the drive, I can't afford to simply replace it, nor am I confident that the drive will last. Yes it's managed two years, but my other 500gb drives are years older and still going strong.

So what do I do? Are there steps to prolong the life of the drive and stop it conking out on me? (Note I've had to run my PC continuously for the last couple months due to a failing monitor, and when the drive suddenly disappeared from windows I was forced to reboot so now I am also down a monitor!) If I DO have to replace it (which I can't, right now, but you know...), what is the process like for imaging the existing drive onto the new one, am I likely to lose any settings or data?

Mostly I just want to keep this one alive for as long as possible, one of my other drives DID do this same thing around the time I GOT the 3TB drive, and required a new data cable and better mounting in my case, and while there were no bad sectors that I remeber, data was corrupted and had to be manually recovered as it wouldn't work automatically, but since I got the cable and screwed it into my case properly, that drive has been fine, so maybe there is hope for the barracuda?...

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

I'm no fan of Seagate drives, lousy experience with everyone I've had -- longest life I got from one of them was just over 2 years.
I only ever buy WD drives now, no regrets so far and the oldest one is going on for it's 7th year.

Provided it doesn't have Windows installed on it, you can test your Barracuda with SeaTools for Windows to check it's current condition:
http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/support/downloads/item/seatools-win-master/

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Willium_Bob_Cole,

The first thing you should do is to just back up the most important data that is stored on the drive.
After that, you can try something simple as just connecting the drive with different cables(both SATA and power ones) to a different SATA port. You can get the cables of one of the other HDDs. The fact that the HDD disappears could indicate some connection issue. After that, you can test the drive with some HDD testing tool that will provide a S.M.A.R.T. report. This will eventually show you what is the condition of the drive. Just keep in mind that once bad sectors strart to appear, there's not really a way to stop that.
I guess the HDD manufacturer should have some sort of brand specific cloning tool. If it hasn't then I guess some third party ones will do the job as well. The cloning process creates exactly the same copy, so you shouldn't have any issues with settings. Though, keep in mind that you are cloning a failing drive. So, any data that is corrupted, will go to the new drive.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD