Question Throwing hard drive fixed it

[triangleBoi]

I have a 500 GB HDD, and was using it last night. I unplugged it and I slept. Today I tried to used it and plugged it. It was making a noise every 4-5 seconds or so. Then I thinked to myself, let me try throwing it. And I did, and it fixed it. It works now. Any idea why?

 

[Grobe]

If a defect hard-drive suddenly just wake up randomly, it doesn't mean it won't die again. Well it most probably won't last for long, so my advice is that the first thing to do is creating backup of any personal/important files on that disk. Don't store anything on that disk you cannot effort to loose.

 

[Cj-tech]

I have a 500 GB HDD, and was using it last night. I unplugged it and I slept. Today I tried to used it and plugged it. It was making a noise every 4-5 seconds or so. Then I thinked to myself, let me try throwing it. And I did, and it fixed it. It works now. Any idea why?

“Throwing” a hard drive is not a good way to “fix” it. You could have made any existing problems worse. What kind of noise was it making? It’s normal to hear some noise from a HDD since they are mechanical drives.

 

[Grobe]

Thing about HDD after EOL

• it makes good bricks, often can be stacked on top of each other.
• The disk platters itself are pretty shiney and can make som fine art out of it.
• The r/w head uses a couple of very strong magnets. Can be put under a plastic bowl and can hold small screws and nuts in place.
• If the power connector isn't damaged, then if liking to work on electronics hobby project you can make yourself a decent 12V/5V interface for your breadboard (not mobo outside a box) to get power from.

like this

 

[ohio_buckeye]

If that did temporarily fix your drive back up any data you want immediately.

 

[triangleBoi]

“Throwing” a hard drive is not a good way to “fix” it. You could have made any existing problems worse. What kind of noise was it making? It’s normal to hear some noise from a HDD since they are mechanical drives.

The thing I ment was it was not working at all, and it was making different noises than it was when it was working.

 

[triangleBoi]

If that did temporarily fix your drive back up any data you want immediately.

I don't store important data on my HDD, just games, UE4 and some random UE4 projects.

 

[USAFRet]

The thing I ment was it was not working at all, and it was making different noises than it was when it was working.

And it is still one foot in the grave.
You just gave it a temporary jump start.

 

[triangleBoi]

I don't know if that's an important information but it is an internal drive I pulled out of my old non-functional laptop to use with a SATA to USB thingy. That laptop had a lifespan about 5 years.

 

[USAFRet]

I don't know if that's an important information but it is an internal drive I pulled out of my old non-functional laptop to use with a SATA to USB thingy. That laptop had a lifespan about 5 years.

Irrelevant.

 

[triangleBoi]

Oh by the way, what I ment by throwing was I dropped it from like 1.5 centimeters.

 

[USAFRet]

Oh by the way, what I ment by throwing was I dropped it from like 1.5 centimeters.

And it is still on deaths door.

 

[triangleBoi]

Why would it just die at night randomly then work after dropping it, I just cannot understand. 1.5 cm is very very short, how did it even matter?

 

[USAFRet]

Why would it just die at night randomly then work after dropping it, I just cannot understand. 1.5 cm is very very short, how did it even matter?

Something was "stuck".
Probably the head arm.
Dropping it dislodged it.

 

[triangleBoi]

Then if it's now free, why is it expected to die?

 

[DSzymborski]

Then if it's now free, why is it expected to die?

Because the fundamental conditions that caused it to have a problem in the first place likely have not changed. It's not like the drive froze because it flipped a coin heads 20 times in a row; the likely cause of a stuck component is the physical deterioration of the drive.

My first car was a 1988 Ford Tempo. When something broken was fixed, it most certainly did not mean that the problem could not recur, because the fundamental reasons why the car broke -- age, mileage, and Ford's incompetence in that era -- still remained.

 

[USAFRet]

Then if it's now free, why is it expected to die?

It is not "fixed".
It is temporarily working again.

 

[triangleBoi]

Isn't there a chance of the issue being temporary, is it 100% permanent and will die soon?

 

[USAFRet]

Isn't there a chance of the issue being temporary, is it 100% permanent and will die soon?

There is always a "chance".
Unlikely, though.


You have a car tire with a slow leak.
You go out in the morning, it is flat.
You get your little pumper thing, and pump it up.

Is it fixed? No.
But it looks just fine, and IS driveable for a few days.

But, a few days days from now, it will go flat again.
This may be while you're driving at 70mph, in the rain.
Leading to loss of control, a spin, a rollover, and everyone dies.

Or, you could replace the faulty tire.

 

[DSzymborski]

Isn't there a chance of the issue being temporary, is it 100% permanent and will die soon?

The chances of the drive dying on any given day range from 0% to 100%. You won't know ahead of time.

All drives are terminally ill from the first time they're turned on. Your plans, from backups to drive replacement, should reflect this reality. Ignoring the reality doesn't make it not the reality.

If you make plans based on the idea "OK, everything is fine now, all better even though I don't know what happened, but it's easier to simply ignore it!" you will likely lose data important to you at some point.

 

[triangleBoi]

The chances of the drive dying on any given day range from 0% to 100%. You won't know ahead of time.

All drives are terminally ill from the first time they're turned on. Your plans, from backups to drive replacement, should reflect this reality. Ignoring the reality doesn't make it not the reality.

If you make plans based on the idea "OK, everything is fine now, all better even though I don't know what happened, but it's easier to simply ignore it!" you will likely lose data important to you at some point.

As I said, I have nothing important here. I just have games, UE4 and random useless UE4 projects. Only important stuff are my code projects and I store them on my SSD and GitHub. I just want a good place to store my games, and it was the HDD.

 

[Grobe]

The chances of the drive dying on any given day range from 0% to 100%. You won't know ahead of time.

True. Because when talking percentages of failure rates, you're not speaking about one individual item but a group with a high count of similar devices, often a batch from the production line.

So from the manufacturers perspective, thay can claim such things as of one million devices, ten thousand (one percent) (just some randoms number I came up with) of those will probably fail during the first half year of use.
But for one particular item, you can't put a number on it (doesn't make sense trying, even if the hdd are in a bad state) - one have to assume it can became defect any moment and take proper measurements to avoid loss of important data.

 

[Ralston18]

And, from the first post:

"I have a 500 GB HDD, and was using it last night. I unplugged it ".

Why did you unplug the HDD? Was the HDD making some noise before you unplugged the HDD?

Was the noise the same noise you heard after you plugged the HDD in again?

Describe the noise(s).

Very likely that the next noise may be terminal for the HDD.

Back up all data (if possible) and ensure that that data is recoverable and readable.

Otherwise resign yourself to spending a lot of time and effort restoring things that you may later realize should have been backed up.

 

[triangleBoi]

And, from the first post:

"I have a 500 GB HDD, and was using it last night. I unplugged it ".

Why did you unplug the HDD? Was the HDD making some noise before you unplugged the HDD?

Was the noise the same noise you heard after you plugged the HDD in again?

Describe the noise(s).

Very likely that the next noise may be terminal for the HDD.

Back up all data (if possible) and ensure that that data is recoverable and readable.

Otherwise resign yourself to spending a lot of time and effort restoring things that you may later realize should have been backed up.

It is an external(ish) one, you can read my older replies and you'll see I said "I pulled it out from my old laptop and used it with SATA to USB". I of course don't keep the SATA to USB cable plugged to my laptop all the time, because I change my position a lot. And you can also see from the above replies there are no important files there. Noises were weird, like scratching. It would be there for 2-3 seconds, and play again after 4-5 seconds.

 

[USAFRet]

And you can also see from the above replies there are no important files there.

From the very first Power On, ALL storage devices are on a slow march towards death.

Yours is simply a lot farther along to that Day Of Death.

It may last another 2 years, it may die in the next 5 minutes.