Removing a Faulty Drive

[ChapyYxx]

When I built my system back in 2013 I had a 1TB hdd I booted from. A few years back I upgraded to an ssd as a boot drive but kept in the hdd for mass storage. Now the hard drive is dying on me. It will have 100% usage with insanely low speeds, making it almost entirely unusable, and this causes issues any time a program wants to scan my computer, usually causing a crash. So, can I just disconnect the SATA from the motherboard and be on my way without any problems?

 

[USAFRet]

When I built my system back in 2013 I had a 1TB hdd I booted from. A few years back I upgraded to an ssd as a boot drive but kept in the hdd for mass storage. Now the hard drive is dying on me. It will have 100% usage with insanely low speeds, making it almost entirely unusable, and this causes issues any time a program wants to scan my computer, usually causing a crash. So, can I just disconnect the SATA from the motherboard and be on my way without any problems?

Try it.
Power off.
Disconnect the HDD.
Power up.

Does it work?

 

[ElectrO_90]

If you download and installed Hard Disk Sentinel (free for 30 days) you can see how damaged your HDD is and also estimate its time of death.

Disconnecting the sata and power is recommended, not just sata.

 

[ChapyYxx]

If you download and installed Hard Disk Sentinel (free for 30 days) you can see how damaged your HDD is and also estimate its time of death.

Disconnecting the sata and power is recommended, not just sata.

Yo thanks this software is sweet. According to that, my hdd has about 5 days left

 

[ElectrO_90]

So get whatever you can off of that hdd before it dies, as it will die soon - the days are not perfect, but at least you know the drive is about to die. It may last a month or an hour.
Get what you can off of it now, either upload to cloud or copy off asap.