Is my hard drive failing?

[sporemasterjw]

So I have had this 1TB Seagate hard drive for roughly 3 years now, It has been a great drive over these years as it is the only part remaining from my original build. But recently my PC has been going haywire, and freezing up ultimately leading to a reboot. This happens randomly for no apparent reason whether the program is installed on said hard drive or my OS SSD. Some times when my PC boots it fails to recognize the 1tb drive at all. As a test I have disconnected the 1TB drive and for the past 2 hours my system has been running with no issues. Also a few times while trying to access the (1tb) drive through windows file explorer has caused it to stop responding and force me to reboot as well. Do you think these could be signs of hard drive failure? Or do you think it is some unrelated issue? These problems have only started recently and randomly which makes me think the hard drive could be to blame.
Thanks in advance.

 

[OneFIshSunfish]

Use CHKDSK to determine if there are any issues it can find.

 

[rkzhao]

It's possible that the drive is failing. If you can pull SMART data from it, that would be helpful for debugging.

While 3 years isn't super long, it's long enough that a 1TB client drive could reasonably begin to have issues.

 

[atljsf]

first change the sata cable for that hard disk and later try cristaldisk info, see if it reports something worth mentioning

also run a checkdisk on the hard disk

do you have backups? of the information stored on that hard disk?

 

[sporemasterjw]

Here is the CrystalDisk/S.M.A.R.T info:

I tried switching SATA ports, and I think this may have been a factor because previously CHKDSK said it could not find any errors, while this time around it located and corrected some errors. Also, previously I could not pull S.M.A.R.T data from the drive, whereas it is now showing me that data.

I will be keeping an eye on it here to see if it has resolved anything. Thanks for the speedy replies guys.

 

[rkzhao]

Pretty much everything looks fine in SMART, given the age of the drive. I don't see anything that points to a failing drive.

The CRC error count is a little high but that could be from a bad SATA slot. It's interesting that you have some command timeouts but it's hard to say what those could have been from.

All of the attributes normally associated directly with drive health are pretty much clean.

 

[sporemasterjw]

After a few days the drive seems to be performing like normal. Thanks for the assistance guys!

 

[atljsf]

if you see the hard drive acting strange, change the sata cable and run cristaldisk to monitor how it responds