Hey, another dead Seagate thread...

[ultranothing]

It was working fine. Nothing in particular happened. Suddenly the format changed to RAW. Disk appears to be empty. Disk management showed the full 8tb but now shows zero. Drive will no longer appear in This PC until it's unplugged. Yep. Plug in the drive, nothing. Wait a minute and unplug it, and it pops up for three seconds. I would like to fix it. I have easeus data recovery which could see the drive but give me an error when I tried to select it, and now won't see it at all.

Even if nothing can be done, I just want to know HOW it could have happened.

 

[USAFRet]

Even if nothing can be done, I just want to know HOW it could have happened.

Because it is a physical device. Drives die sometimes. Eventually, all of them die.

If it's under warranty, replace it for free and recover your data from your backup.
If it's out of warranty, replace it and recover your data from your backup.

 

[asoroka]

how old is it.

Manufacturers will quote many numbers with respect to reliability.
URR - unrecoverable read error 1 in every 10^14 bits read. (so 10 TB or so)
MTBF - Mean time between failure 1.5M hours (many have failed before this)

But it all comes down to the fact that some will fail sooner than others.

Look here for real word statistics
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2017/

but you can expect an annual failure rate of 1.1% on your drive.

There are things that shorten the life of a HDD.
1) moving or bumping them while they are spinning
2) having too many in an enclosure without proper vibration damping
3) excessive heat.
4) Bad luck