Is my hard drive failing?

[nicowp]

I have a Western Digital Elements Play that I use as an external hard drive.
Today I was going to download a game from steam at 6MB/s to that drive. When the download speed reached 5/6MB/s the download paused and it said "writing to disk" a few seconds later the drive disconnected from the computer and to get it to show up again I needed to un-plug and re-plug it.
I then put a limit on the download speed to 1MB/s. this worked perfectly and the drive never got disconnected.
I have never had this problem before when transfering or downloading files.
I have also heard it "clicking" when it is under load.

I am curious that it will fail since I have important files on it.

What is your thoughts?

Thanks in advance!

 

[HEXiT]

check your event logs. it should give an idea as to why the dire disconnected...

 

[USAFRet]

1. Copy anything important off that drive. (you should be doing this anyway)
2. A drive making new noises is usually not a good thing. Especially as it has exhibited other symptoms.

 

[Ra_V_en]

Download Hard Disk Sentinel http://www.hdsentinel.com/ and run full surface test, choose the correct drive from the list and choose "read test".
After the test you will know is it about bad sectors or not, even if its not showing bad sectors during the test itself on S.M.A.R.T section you can still have shown errors which might provide information about disk health.

Once I've started having issues with darn Seagate's I'm using the software on every station i work with.

 

[TechGuyMn]

Western Digital has a Diagnostic tool you can run here http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=613&sid=3&lang=en

 

[Ra_V_en]

@ Up... Seagate does to, SeaTools which is useful if the hdd is dead as brick, before that tells you its fine even you are certainly sure it isn't... but what the heck its worth to try

Btw funny story in my case.... I actually killed the drives myself torturing it with read/write 24/7 untill SeaTools throw an error allowing me to RMA

 

[nicowp]

Thank you all very much!
I will try these methods and then show you the results!

Edit
Since these tests take long time I will get back as soon as they're done!

 

[nicowp]

check your event logs. it should give an idea as to why the dire disconnected...

How can I find that in the event log?

 

[Ra_V_en]

Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Event Viewer. Under system section you gonna get disk errors:

Screen
To filter this mess, use "Filter Current Log" and choose Event Level: [Critical, Error, Warning] and Event sources: [disk, Disk]

I think thats what he had in mind 😉
My personal bet Event ID: 7

 

[FALC0N]

USAFRet nailed the answer. The "clicking" is tell-tale. That drive is clearly dying. Back it up while you can. No need to screw around with the other stuff until that's accomplished.

 

[nicowp]

Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Event Viewer. Under system section you gonna get disk errors:

Screen
To filter this mess, use "Filter Current Log" and choose Event Level: [Critical, Error, Warning] and Event sources: [disk, Disk]

I think thats what he had in mind 😉
My personal bet Event ID: 7

Thank you very much!

But I could only find Warnings from the past months and Errors from last year.

 

[nicowp]

Download Hard Disk Sentinel http://www.hdsentinel.com/ and run full surface test, choose the correct drive from the list and choose "read test".
After the test you will know is it about bad sectors or not, even if its not showing bad sectors during the test itself on S.M.A.R.T section you can still have shown errors which might provide information about disk health.

Once I've started having issues with darn Seagate's I'm using the software on every station i work with.

Western Digital has a Diagnostic tool you can run here http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=613&sid=3&lang=en

@ Up... Seagate does to, SeaTools which is useful if the hdd is dead as brick, before that tells you its fine even you are certainly sure it isn't... but what the heck its worth to try

Btw funny story in my case.... I actually killed the drives myself torturing it with read/write 24/7 untill SeaTools throw an error allowing me to RMA

Haha, great you got your RMA Ra_V_en! 😀

Thank you all very much!
I've tried all of these test and they says the disk is in perfect condition! (but I'm still a bit courious since the reduced speed, wich the scans don't notice?)

As USAFRet and FALC0N said, the clicking sound stil makes me very courious, plus the reduced speed.

1. Copy anything important off that drive. (you should be doing this anyway)
2. A drive making new noises is usually not a good thing. Especially as it has exhibited other symptoms.

 

[FALC0N]

Curious? If that "clicking" is as you describe, your hard drive is dying. Period. Hard drive health tests are nice, but they are not a reliable indicator of all issues.

 

[USAFRet]

Changing (decreasing) performance
New noises (clicking)

Your drive is dying. There is no 'curious'.

You can choose to ignore it, and lose whatever is on that drive when it does actually die.
Or you can save the only important part of the situation...the data. Hardware is easily replaced.

 

[HEXiT]

ive had plenty of drives that click. my old maxtor which is going on 8 years old clicks every time it reaches the end of the platter. you can hear it traveling the disk then a slight click as it nears the edge. which is normal in its case. it happens 1s every 10 seconds or so if im heavy writing to it.
so figuring out what is a normal click and what isnt is essential.

constant ticking every half second or so isnt good though.
ticking with no motor noise is also pretty bad as this often points to jammed up bearings (stick the drive in a freezer for a few hours and immediately rescue your data upon removal. (freezing causes the metal to contract so will feee up most jammed up parts but its a 1 hit deal after its dont the drive will truely be dead.)
head thrashing is a sign of either heavy fragmentation or bad sectors.

so yeah knowing what noises your drive makes normally and what is new will help you decide if its failing.
personally i just run chkdsk and more often than not if a drive is failing that will tell me by the sheer amount of bad sectors it has to remap.

 

[Ra_V_en]

Agreed, clicking itself might not be enough reason to say it straight: "drive is done" or at least its not enough reason for RMA, but still being curious and safe is good idea.

You said you did full surface test was there any block different then green (yellow or red)? Another question, can you check at HDD sentinel life expectancy and on SMART tab reallocated sector count?

Those test are quite deterministic but counts only about plates status, while clicking might also mean headers fault which is quite hard to determine if SMART attributes are not filled properly by firmware (and i do know hdd vendors can be very conservative about it)
Anyways look over here on the bottom of the page and search for those pink attributes then check in the Sentinel does those attributes fine, if any has exclamation mark thats some clue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

 

[FALC0N]

I have never seen a clicking drive not fail. We are obviously talking about abnormal clicking here. Sometimes, it's the next day, sometimes it's 4 months later, but it always happens.

 

[USAFRet]

I have never seen a clicking drive not fail. We are obviously talking about abnormal clicking here. Sometimes, it's the next day, sometimes it's 4 months later, but it always happens.

Right.
Performance getting worse?
Making noises?

It is dying.

Most people don't think about doing a backup, until about 5 minutes after they need it.

 

[FALC0N]

I wouldn't RMA it based on clicking, but I would surely back up that data.

 

[nicowp]

Agreed, clicking itself might not be enough reason to say it straight: "drive is done" or at least its not enough reason for RMA, but still being curious and safe is good idea.

You said you did full surface test was there any block different then green (yellow or red)? Another question, can you check at HDD sentinel life expectancy and on SMART tab reallocated sector count?

Those test are quite deterministic but counts only about plates status, while clicking might also mean headers fault which is quite hard to determine if SMART attributes are not filled properly by firmware (and i do know hdd vendors can be very conservative about it)
Anyways look over here on the bottom of the page and search for those pink attributes then check in the Sentinel does those attributes fine, if any has exclamation mark thats some clue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

Thank you!
In the S.M.A.R.T. section, everything is green
It estimated lifetime is 1000 or more days.

Where are those pink attributes?
Thanks!

 

[nicowp]

Changing (decreasing) performance
New noises (clicking)

Your drive is dying. There is no 'curious'.

You can choose to ignore it, and lose whatever is on that drive when it does actually die.
Or you can save the only important part of the situation...the data. Hardware is easily replaced.

Thank you!
Yeah, curious was actually the wrong word, more like scared
I am going to save all my important data to another drive untill I buy a new.