Question ask the wizards on Tomshardware to check my hard drive

[pikapika1998]

My 2.5 4TB hdd hard drive is still in good condition after 2 years? Do I need to format it again? Thank you.

 

[Bob.B]

My 2.5 4TB hdd hard drive is still in good condition after 2 years? Do I need to format it again? Thank you.

Unless your having a problem with the disk leave it alone.

 

[COLGeek]

Regardless of storage device health, do you have a backup system in place?

 

[Misgar]

If you have the patience, download the Backblaze stats and see if you can find your drive. Seagate often feature amongst the least reliable drives in their lists. Some models are much better than others.
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data

As an example, here are a few stats from 2023. Note the two 14TB Seagate drives with over 13% failures. That's why you need backups on other drives.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/

 

[fzabkar]

There have been 20 (= 0x14) Command Timeouts where the drive has required more than 7 seconds to complete a command.

 

[Misgar]

There have been 20 (= 0x14) Command Timeouts where the drive has required more than 7 seconds to complete a command.

That might be because the drive is probably SMR, if this web page applies:
https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/products/cmr-smr-list/

If the drive is heavily fragmented, you'll get extended write-amplification times when saving new data if it's SMR, not CMR. For this reason I stopped buying SMR drives in 2018.
https://www.howtogeek.com/803276/cmr-vs.-smr-hard-drives-whats-the-difference/

Things might improve if you copy all the data to another drive and delete all the files. Probably no need to reformat the drive, expecially if it's a quick format.

I recommend running Hard Disk Sentinel's non-distructive Read-only surface test on the drive. It could take 6 to 8 hours, but you'll get a better idea of the drive integrity.
https://www.hdsentinel.com/help/en/61_surfacetest.html

With a data transfer rate of only 130MB/s (max) it's not particularly fast either, but that's typical of 2.5" laptop drives. A 10K RPM SAS 12Gb/s 2.5" server drive might be considerably faster (and cost 10x as much).
https://www.seagate.com/www-content...op-fam/barracuda_25/en-us/docs/100804767c.pdf