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[6233638]

Well I woke up to this today, which has no doubt been caused by the heatwave we've been having here:



I normally use Acronis to handle backups, but they are stored in a proprietary format and the data is inaccessible without mounting the image.
So I wanted to clone the drive instead, which is a function that Acronis also has, but I have two issues with it:

• The bootloader doesn't work with Windows 8 (still!) so you need to create bootable rescue media instead.
• My USB3 disks are not visible after booting from the rescue media, so I cannot clone the disk.

 
I don't trust simply copying the files via Explorer, because I have done that with a failing disk in the past and some of the files ended up corrupted.


Edit: According to Windows, the drive is fine?

Code: [Select]

Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems.
No further action is required.

1953513471 KB total disk space.
1923481692 KB in 826 files.
       360 KB in 35 indexes.
         0 KB in bad sectors.
    128647 KB in use by the system.
     65536 KB occupied by the log file.
  29902772 KB available on disk.

[jmone]

Is this the OS disk or just a data disk?  I use http://www.partition-tool.com/ for such tasks though have asked the author of HDS to offer a clone option (which he said he will ... some day...).  Another option in HDS is to use the "Read + Write + read test" to refresh all the data on the disk.  It should force the remapping of the bad sectors but it takes ages on a large disks.

[6233638]

It's a 2TB storage drive, unfortunately it has most of my DVD rips on it.

[jmone]

If in doubt, open a post on the HDS forum and then Use the "Send Test Report to Developer" option.  He always answers promptly with advice on what to do.

[jmone]

It's a 2TB storage drive, unfortunately it has most of my DVD rips on it.

Easy then.  Use a tool like FreeFileSync with "File Content" (as apposed to File Time and Size) on.  It will copy the files and do a bit sum check from one structure to another....

[jmone]

Once it is done do a second compare between the two with File Content to double check the copy is identical.

[6233638]

If in doubt, open a post on the HDS forum and then Use the "Send Test Report to Developer" option.  He always answers promptly with advice on what to do.

I'm running a full CHKDSK scan now (Windows 8 uses a new method by default) and once that finishes, I will do that.

Easy then.  Use a tool like FreeFileSync with "File Content" (as apposed to File Time and Size) on.  It will copy the files and do a bit sum check from one structure to another....
Once it is done do a second compare between the two with File Content to double check the copy is identical.

Will do, thanks.



The worst part of this is that just yesterday, I actually ordered another external disk specifically to have an offline backup of all my DVD rips, as the benefit of not ripping 800+ items again, and sorting out TV episodes outweighed the cost.

I really need to do something about getting a new case that can support a decent number of drives now. The FT02 I'm using is supposed to be great for airflow, but my drives have still been hitting 40℃ in the midday heat the last few days, and it only holds five internal HDDs and one SSD nicely. I could add a 3-in-2 bay adapter, but that will have terrible airflow, and it's only a temporary solution.

I was thinking about picking up some enterprise drives now, but those are still far too expensive. I can buy two and a half 4TB Seagates for the cost of a single enterprise drive.

[jmone]

Have a read of this - http://www.hdsentinel.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1531  the google study found that low temp was more of an issue but the real prob was certain drive models (which they would not name).

Edit - temps in the 40's is fine - all mine run around this temp (I have over a dozen - mostly 4tb Hitachi but a couple of segate 3tb).  Previously I had 2TB WD's and the WD20EADS never had an issue but every one of the WD20EARS failed horribly (first of the 4K sector models)....the newer WD20EARX models seem OK.

[jmone]

I should say due to my previous HDD failures (see edit above), I now backup all my content to a second pool.  I got sick of restoring all my rips for disk....nothing beats a backup (if you can afford the extra $ that is)

[6233638]

Previously I had 2TB WD's and the WD20EADS never had an issue but every one of the WD20EARS failed horribly (first of the 4K sector models)....the newer WD20EARX models seem OK.

Typical. I have a WD15EADS which is maybe four years old and I haven't had any trouble with it at all. This drive is a WD20EARS which is maybe half that age, and I have a second one that was purchased at the same time (I generally buy disks when they have a "2 for X" offer) so I guess I should be looking into replacing all three of them. This is going to be an expensive month…  

I should say due to my previous HDD failures (see edit above), I now backup all my content to a second pool.  I got sick of restoring all my rips for disk....nothing beats a backup (if you can afford the extra $ that is)

I just don't have the money or space to clone all my drives. There's nowhere else with adequate ventilation or ethernet running to it that I could place another tower, and I'm struggling to keep up with the cost of disks just to rip my library to.

Since switching to Media Center, I've shifted from basically just ripping a few discs at a time when I feel like I'm going to watch them, to ripping everything and getting rid of the shelves full of media.
Previously I wasn't too concerned about losing data, as I could just rip things again, but now that I have my entire music and DVD library on there, backup is becoming very important, due to the amount of discs which fit on a hard drive these days. With Blu-ray I'm not so concerned - yet.

I've moved from having a single 1TB drive that I maybe copied my files to once every couple of months, to two 2TB drives that are always connected, one running daily backups, and one running "non-stop" backups.
This weekend I also purchased a pair of 2TB drives so that I can have weekly rotating offline backups of my music (so far, that is still less than 1TB) and another 2TB disk to have an offline backup of all my ripped DVDs and Blu-ray TV shows. (I don't want to be figuring out which files are the right episodes again)
I may repurpose one of the "online" backup disks, as I shouldn't need four copies of my music - but I'm just really paranoid about it now.

[InflatableMouse]

The message is bad sectors during self test. Basically, a harddrive always does a verify of the data it writes to each sector, this is the main reason why reading is faster than writing to a harddrive. When a verify fails, the harddisk increases the bad sector count for SMART and relocates this sector to a reserved area. This space is limited and once it runs out, permanent dataloss will occur. Since this relocating process is done internally, Scandisk or the OS will never see it. HD Sentinel did the self-test which looks at SMART counters, among other things. It detected an increase in bad sectors and threw you that warning.

I don't know if you've already replaced the disk at this point, but if you didn't, stop using it and don't run scandisks on it; this stresses the disk unneccesarily and may cause more sectors to fail or worse, cause the drive to fail completely. Your priority is getting the data off the disk - I think Jmone's suggestion is a good one.

I wouldn't clone the drive with cloning utilities unless there is no other way. The sync utility suggested works from Windows, your data is static (DVD rips only?) and you can monitor the drives health and temperature from Windows. Rebooting to some recovery mode doesn't allow for that.

[jmone]

I feel you pain.... I bit the bullet and built two 30TB pools (on mostly 4TB Hitachi) but it cost $$$$.  Those EARS are absolute crap.  The good news was some of mine were in WTY so when I RMA'ed them I got EARX models back and so far no issue with them (using them in my WHS as the OS and an OS backup drive just fine).

Also - 4TB HDD conserve Sata Ports and Bays in your HW setup, and are now under $200 a pop.

[jmone]

I like the Hitachi 4TB Deskstars.  They are big, fast and rated for 24x7 use.  That said the oldest I have is just shy of 400days of Power On Time and I've not had an issue (see pic)....time will tell.

[InflatableMouse]

but my drives have still been hitting 40℃ in the midday heat the last few days,

I believe up to 45C operating temperature is perfectly fine. I don't even worry hitting 50C on a large copy/sync job, as long as it drops afterwards .

[6233638]

I don't know if you've already replaced the disk at this point, but if you didn't, stop using it and don't run scandisks on it; this stresses the disk unneccesarily and may cause more sectors to fail or worse, cause the drive to fail completely. Your priority is getting the data off the disk - I think Jmone's suggestion is a good one.

I wouldn't clone the drive with cloning utilities unless there is no other way. The sync utility suggested works from Windows, your data is static (DVD rips only?) and you can monitor the drives health and temperature from Windows. Rebooting to some recovery mode doesn't allow for that.

Thanks, I have stopped CHKDSK and am now using FreeFileSync to copy the files over.

I feel you pain.... I bit the bullet and built two 30TB pools (on mostly 4TB Hitachi) but it cost $$$$.  Those EARS are absolute crap.  The good news was some of mine were in WTY so when I RMA'ed them I got EARX models back and so far no issue with them (using them in my WHS as the OS and an OS backup drive just fine).

I think they had a three year warranty when I purchased them (all HDD manufacturers seem to be scaling back their warranties now) so I should be covered. It seems unlikely that I'll get another WD20EARS back.

Also - 4TB HDD conserve Sata Ports and Bays in you HW setup and are now under $200 a pop.

I wish they were that cheap here. I have seen a deal on a pair of 4TB Seagates that works out about that price though, but to be honest I've not had great luck with Seagate drives in the past and am hesitant to buy them.
I agree with you about always buying the highest capacity drive making the most sense, even though 3TB is where the best value is at right now.
I wish they would get around to increasing capacities again. It seems like we've been stuck at 4TB for a while now, and current efforts are on producing 4TB drives with one less platter, than increasing the upper limits.

Right now I have:

120GB Patriot Wildfire SSD
1.5TB WD15EADS
1.5TB Samsung
2.0TB WD20EARS
2.0TB WD20EARS
4.0TB Hitachi Deskstar

The two 1.5TB drives are 3-4 years old at this point, and should probably be replaced before they fail.
It seems like I am taking a risk if I stick with the WD20EARS, so even if I get a WD20EARX back, I should still be replacing the other one.

The thing is that I just don't like getting rid of old drives that are still functional. I still have a working 500GB drive kicking around here somewhere. Perhaps I should be re-purposing them as archived backups now.
I bought one of those SATA>USB3 docks (StarTech) but had limited success with it. Whenever I tried testing the disk with HDsentinel it was throwing up errors that basically indicated that the connection was unreliable, even if the drive wasn't completely disappearing from the system. It was a dual drive dock though, so perhaps I should try a single drive dock, or an eSATA one instead.

I like the Hitachi 4TB Deskstars.  They are big, fast and rated for 24x7 use.  That said the oldest I have is just shy of 400days of Power On Time and I've not had an issue (see pic)....time will tell.

I have one of those drives and it seems fine overall, but it is quite noisy, and one of the hotter running drives in my system. It's consistently 4-6℃ hotter than the WD drives. But I don't know if that's just an issue with how it's being reported. The 1.5TB Samsung I have reports its temperature as being 10℃ lower than every other disk in the system. I haven't measured it, but that seems highly unlikely.

I didn't realize the Hitachi was rated for 24/7 use, but I was somewhat concerned by the 1 year warranty when I bought it. At the time, I needed 4TB and couldn't afford anything else with a better warranty though. (3 year WD Red, or 5 years on an enterprise drive I think?)

I believe up to 45C operating temperature is perfectly fine. I don't even worry hitting 50C on a large copy/sync job, as long as it drops afterwards

Yeah, it's not usually a concern, but that seems the most likely culprit considering that temperatures have been about 10-15℃ warmer than usual this last week.



I really do need to sort out a proper storage system, but every time I look into it I get 20 different recommendations, which either cost a fortune or compromise in some way that I just decide it's easier to stick with what I have and add another disk somehow.

Part of the problem is that where the HTPC is located it's visible (so aesthetics matter) and only a tower will suffice - a rack style case like the Norcos will not fit.
Cables for it are run through the walls (which have their own issues, like USB expansion) so that there's minimal noise inside the HT room, but due to its location, noise is still a concern.

I do have ethernet wired through the walls, but I don't know if the installer either skimped on the cable costs (I specified Cat 6) or if there's something else causing this, but I only seem to be getting 100mb rather than gigabit speeds through it. This has not been a major issue so far, as it's only used to share a DSL connection, but it would be a problem if I was moving to networked storage. Even gigabit isn't really fast enough for that now.
If you're ever moving into a place and getting work like this done, make sure you get a lot of references for the installers and oversee the job yourself. I went with a recommendation, and let a (non-technical) family member oversee this instead, and there have been all sorts of issues with the cabling - and due to how it has been installed it's a huge job to try and replace anything or run a new cable.

[jmone]

Yeah I've got a couple of the Samsung 3TB and 4TB in my WHS pool and I'm not as keen on them (no more than an impression) but they were cheap at the time in a USB Enclosure and I just ripped them out.  The Hitachi's I have are 7200 rpm and are much faster than the WD Greens (5400) but as you see in the pic run hotter (these drives don't run as much as the backup server only wakes up for a few hours a day on average).  The Seagate's also run cooler but don't seem as fast to me.

FYI - my HTPC pulls all the data from the "Main" PC where the drives are physically located over Gigabit.  I'd be surprised if your cable is bad, could it be the switch (I had all sorts of issues with one of those cheap DLink 5 port things and got an HP instead).

Did you manage to copy the data across and verified?  Once done you can use HDS to reinit the disc (back to factory) but I found that the WD20EARS just kept getting worse and worse, then the others also started failing within a few weeks.

[6233638]

Did you manage to copy the data across and verified?  Once done you can use HDS to reinit the disc (back to factory) but I found that the WD20EARS just kept getting worse and worse, then the others also started failing within a few weeks.

Well it took about 7 hours, but the data did appear to copy over correctly, and it's now about halfway through comparing the files.

The health of the drive has continued to deteriorate, so it definitely appears to be on its way out, but thankfully HDsentinel seems to have warned me about it before it was too late.
I may have regretted that DriveBender experiment a while back, but it got me to purchase HDsentinel, which has proven to be invaluable.

FYI - my HTPC pulls all the data from the "Main" PC where the drives are physically located over Gigabit.  I'd be surprised if your cable is bad, could it be the switch (I had all sorts of issues with one of those cheap DLink 5 port things and got an HP instead).

It's mostly all running into a Netgear WNDR3700 (which I bought back before I was forced to use DSL) though now that I think about it, I do have a couple of devices also going through the ISP-supplied router as some of the cables that were run through the wall were faulty and that was my only option - I should probably investigate that. My fault for assuming, but you would think that something recent enough to have 802.11n should have gigabit ports, but who knows…

Unfortunately my ISP requires that you use one of their routers, so I'm not sure what can be done if that does end up being the cause.

[jmone]

Your WNDR3700 has gigabit ports but earlier routers tended to only have 100Mbit (and they are router ports which are a bit slower than those on a HW Switch).  You can either use the ports on the WNDR3700 for stuff you want to have Gigabit access and put stuff like printers etc on the adsl routers slower ports or just get a gigabyte switch and plug everything (including the adsl router) into its ports.  The adsl router has no idea the switch is there and the only traffic than then goes to the adsl router will be external traffic.

Good to see you got your data off.  By the way this is exactly what I saw.  First some errors, then the got worse very quickly as I was trying to "fix" the drive.  Once it is all off and verified try to "reinitialise" but all I did was generate heaps of errors.  I just RMA'ed them at that point.

[6233638]

Should I have some kind of confirmation after the comparison in FreeFileSync is finished, or if it closed without errors it everything OK?
I left it on overnight and when I woke the machine today, I just ended up on the main application window.

Edit: Looks like it was successful - it only displays differences by default.

[InflatableMouse]

The health of the drive has continued to deteriorate, so it definitely appears to be on its way out, but thankfully HDsentinel seems to have warned me about it before it was too late.
I may have regretted that DriveBender experiment a while back, but it got me to purchase HDsentinel, which has proven to be invaluable.

Glad to hear you got your data off in time. SMART counters are useful and HD Sentinel does a good job of interpreting them, so they are useful but that's where it ends. I've had drives fail without warning and in your case if bad sectors had accumulated faster or if that self test hadn't run you would've lost data as well. Unfortunately it's all we have.

FYI,  I've dumped drive bender as well.  I'm back to single disks and I'm using good sync to copy important folders to other drives and pc's. When Haswell nuc's come out they hopefully have one with the hd5000 then I'll get that for a htpc and move this tower upstairs as a server. I'm considering windows server 2012, freenas and unraid. Or leave it as it is.

[jmone]

Should I have some kind of confirmation after the comparison in FreeFileSync is finished, or if it closed without errors it everything OK?
I left it on overnight and when I woke the machine today, I just ended up on the main application window.

Edit: Looks like it was successful - it only displays differences by default.

Correct

[6233638]

Huh, so I ran the WD "Data LifeGuard Diagnostics" tool, and it repaired 38 bad sectors on the disk.
Drive Health went from 11% to 43% in HDsentinel. After having HDsentinel reinitialize the disk surface, it's only reporting one bad sector and drive health is back up to 90%.

I'm going to run both these tools on the drive again to see if the condition deteriorates again, but it seems that it may actually be OK now?

[glynor]

I'm going to run both these tools on the drive again to see if the condition deteriorates again, but it seems that it may actually be OK now?

Drives developing bad sectors spontaneously is almost never a good sign.  If it is just a handful, it might be okay for a long time once you get them remapped, but more often than not, they "grow" (sometimes little by little, sometimes it is a sign of impending catastrophe).  You want to see a good long "history" of read/write usage without additional problems cropping up.  You could put it through some paces (erase/verify wipe passes or something) for a week or two and see how it looks (HD Tune Pro is awesome for this), but...

In any case... Don't trust it.

[6233638]

Well that's why I'm running both utilities again, as it's touching every part of the disk to see if any more errors crop up. I figure after doing that a couple of times, if the number does not increase I should be OK?
Edit: And another 5 bad sectors just showed up. Yeah, I think the drive is done.
And my other WD20EARS just went from 0-15, and 15-16 bad sectors.

Still waiting on the external drives I ordered to show up, but I may pull that drive out of the system until they are here and have been tested.

[jmone]

Exactly what happened with my WD20EARS - Just RMA them and save yourself the worry about when / if you lose data.

[craigmcg]

My experience is similar to jmone's with EARS (bought 4, 3 were RMAed). I now buy either WD RED (performance not so great for file transfers but work fine for AV playback) or WD Blacks.

[6233638]

For what it's worth, the drive has been sitting in my system unused for a couple of days because I'm still waiting on the external drives I ordered to show up, and want to RMA both WD20EARS at the same time.
Even though there are no partitions on it and it's just been sitting there, the bad sector count has gradually been increasing and drive health is back down to where it was before. So it's definitely dying/dead.

I'm going to use this as an opportunity to replace the WD15EADS with a 4TB drive as well, because that's just getting too old to be used as a primary storage drive now.

So that's another 6 months or so I'll have delayed the inevitable need to actually replace my case with something designed to hold a larger number of drives.
Maybe I'll be able to hold off until Broadwell and the Nvidia 800 series before I really have to do anything and can just build a new system.

[habermehl]

<snip>
I don't trust simply copying the files via Explorer, because I have done that with a failing disk in the past and some of the files ended up corrupted.

Teracopy (http://codesector.com/teracopy) is an excellent tool for copying large data sets. It can perform a CRC check after the copy to give you confidence that the copy is accurate.
--
Regards,

David

[MrC]

Yeah, once a mechanical device like this starts going south, its doomed.  They don't just spontaneously recover; there's some mechanical defect which won't go away.  So, say your goodbyes, mourn, and recover.

[6233638]

My experience is similar to jmone's with EARS (bought 4, 3 were RMAed). I now buy either WD RED (performance not so great for file transfers but work fine for AV playback) or WD Blacks.

Yeah, once a mechanical device like this starts going south, its doomed.  They don't just spontaneously recover; there's some mechanical defect which won't go away.  So, say your goodbyes, mourn, and recover.

Now that everything has been backed up onto external drives, I have RMA'd both the WD20EARS, and replaced them with a pair of the new 4TB WD SE drives, which cost approximately the same as WD Blacks, but are targeting datacenter storage and high capacity NAS devices.

I'm speculating here, but I just took a look at the drive datasheets, and the WD SE is specified at 171 MB/s, and the Blacks at 154MB/s, so it would appear that they're using 4x 1TB platters rather than 5x 800 GB platters.
I actually didn't pay much attention to the spec sheet before, and had been under the impression that the WD SE drives were going to be slower as they're built for reliability rather than speed - I only checked the datasheet just now when I saw speeds of ~170MB/s when initializing the new drives.

They seem to be a good middle ground between the cheap Hitachis, and the WD RE drives, costing about 1/3 more, rather than twice the cost.
And they have a five year warranty rather than the three year warranty of the Reds, which didn't seem worth it for the price. (and the Reds only go up to 3TB)


When the replacement 2TB drives turn up, I will probably use them to replace the aging 1.5TB disks that are still in use - or I may just sell them and replace them with another WD SE, leaving me with a free drive bay.

Teracopy (http://codesector.com/teracopy) is an excellent tool for copying large data sets. It can perform a CRC check after the copy to give you confidence that the copy is accurate.
Regards, David

Thanks. I'll look into that, though FreeFileSync seems to have worked well.

[jmone]

It's funny how one bad experience (WD20EARS) will sour your whole brand loyalty.  I've had around 100 drives from WD over the years (thanks to MC's demand for space) and never had an issue till the WD20EARS.  I used to only buy WD..... but thanks to the WD20EARS I've not bought one since even though the earlier model WD20EADS and the replacement WD20EARX are fine.  Now buy Hitachi (even though they are owned by WD).

[InflatableMouse]

My worst experience is with Seagate. I had a few bad ones in the past and swore never to get Seagate again. Couple of years back I figured problems must be solved and they got some good reviews, so I got 2 ST31500341AS drives. Both started accumilating bad sectors and within 4 monthts I RMA'd them because of them failed completely. I got 2 new ones. Same story, except these are stuck on 4 on one and 11 on the other. Every once in a while I get 1 one extra. Spin up errors on both too but they are both out of warranty now.

But there's another thing that no other drive in my system does and I've never seen before, raw error rate is like 250 million and seek error rate around 100 million on both drives and hardware ecc recovery rate is also around 200 million. Needless to say I only store temporary stuff and I don't trust them with anything else.

I'll never ever get another Seagate again, and this time I'm serious about it .

[6233638]

It's funny how one bad experience (WD20EARS) will sour your whole brand loyalty.  I've had around 100 drives from WD over the years (thanks to MC's demand for space) and never had an issue till the WD20EARS.  I used to only buy WD..... but thanks to the WD20EARS I've not bought one since even though the earlier model WD20EADS and the replacement WD20EARX are fine.  Now buy Hitachi (even though they are owned by WD).

I have such bad luck with electronics that I don't blame the company for it if something goes wrong. It does seem that the WD20EARS drives may have been more prone to failure than others due to things like excessive head parking - but on the other hand a failure within the warranty period is quite uncommon with hard drives in my experience, unless they fail right at the beginning. Generally though, I have had nothing but good experiences with Western Digital drives - in this case I may have had two impending failures, but I didn't lose any data, which is a first for me.

I have nothing bad to say about Hitachi either, they seem to be a good option if you want cheap high capacity drives, though WD seem to be the better option if you want something with a better warranty. (the Hitachi drives with 5 years cost more than a WD RE here)

Seagate have had a number of firmware issues over the years, and they bought Maxtor, so you don't know what you are getting these days. Maxtor are the one hard drive brand I would never touch again after working in a PC shop. Their failure rate was considerably higher than any other brand. Well, other than the IBM Deathstars.

Samsung, I won't buy on principle. (except when I'm out of options and need a drive now…) I just don't like how they operate as a company, and I've had bad experiences with their products in the past.

[glynor]

I have such bad luck with electronics that I don't blame the company for it if something goes wrong. It does seem that the WD20EARS drives may have been more prone to failure than others due to things like excessive head parking - but on the other hand a failure within the warranty period is quite uncommon with hard drives in my experience, unless they fail right at the beginning. Generally though, I have had nothing but good experiences with Western Digital drives - in this case I may have had two impending failures, but I didn't lose any data, which is a first for me.

I have nothing bad to say about Hitachi either, they seem to be a good option if you want cheap high capacity drives, though WD seem to be the better option if you want something with a better warranty. (the Hitachi drives with 5 years cost more than a WD RE here)

Seagate have had a number of firmware issues over the years, and they bought Maxtor, so you don't know what you are getting these days. Maxtor are the one hard drive brand I would never touch again after working in a PC shop. Their failure rate was considerably higher than any other brand. Well, other than the IBM Deathstars.

Samsung, I won't buy on principle. (except when I'm out of options and need a drive now…) I just don't like how they operate as a company, and I've had bad experiences with their products in the past.

+1 to all of that.

[newsposter]

I mirror everything.  In my desktops and the server.  And backup to an external service that is itself a mirror set.

Drive prices are pretty much back down to pre-Thailand flood levels.

[6233638]

Drive prices are pretty much back down to pre-Thailand flood levels.

The problem is that they may have just recovered to pre-flood prices, but that's been almost two years of no real capacity increases, and prices remaining where they were, rather than dropping as you would expect.

-

I received my replacement drives quicker than expected, and was sent a pair of WD20EARX.
Unfortunately the label for these says that they are recertified drives, rather than WD Green drives.

I had been planning on selling the two, and using the funds from that to pay for another 4TB disk, but after checking the prices, selling them would only pay for half a 4TB drive, so I might as well keep them.
I'm just going to replace my older 1.5TB drives with the new 2TB ones for now, which should last longer, and give me an extra 1TB of space.


I picked up an Orico dual bay eSATA/USB3 dock, which seems to work a lot better than the StarTech one I purchased before. I was able to do a full read/write surface check on an older 500GB drive without any errors showing up - the StarTech one failed within about 5 minutes each time. (it seemed like the connection to the drive was being reset, rather than a fault with the drive)
For some reason though, hot-swapping doesn't appear to work with eSATA. I don't know if it's the dock or my motherboard at fault there, but it's not the end of the world having to reboot the machine to access them.

My plan for the dock is to use my older SATA drives that are no longer connected to the system as long-term backups. As far as I know, hard drives are not likely to fail when they aren't being used - my plan is to only update these backups a few times a year.
That old 500GB drive is now an additional backup of my music library, and the pair of 1.5TB disks is enough storage to keep complete backups of my DVD and TV libraries.

For now, I'll just have to accept that if one of my other drives dies, I will just have to pull all the discs out and re-rip my Blu-rays.
But re-ripping Blu-rays is not the end of the world, because you can't fit nearly as many of them onto a single drive, and you don't have to swap the discs out every 5 minutes, as you do with CDs and DVDs.

[6233638]

…and this is what I mean when I say I have bad luck. I just got around to connecting up the second drive today, because I've had to back up both the 1.5TB disks before removing them - and they've sent me a dead drive.

[jmone]

I did not want to say anything but those "reconditioned" drives are drive others have sent back under RMA and they have used a util (like HDS) to re-initialise the surface, recheck for errors, put a new sticker on it and ship it back out (with the wty on your original disk - so they don't have to last too long).  That said, I've never had a EARX fail.

[6233638]

I did not want to say anything but those "reconditioned" drives are drive others have sent back under RMA and they have used a util (like HDS) to re-initialise the surface, recheck for errors, put a new sticker on it and ship it back out (with the wty on your original disk - so they don't have to last too long).  That said, I've never had a EARX fail.

Huh, I'd have thought that it would have been more rigorous than that. I did a full test on the other drive before using it, and that seems to be fine.

This one adds about three minutes to the boot time, shows up as 0MB in the BIOS (rather than 2TB) and doesn't even appear in Windows.  

[JeTie]

If you're still looking for cloning tools, see also the HDD manufacturers sites, e.g. for...
WD: http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119&wdc_lang=en
Maxtor and Seagate (DiscWizard): http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/

These are free Acronis TrueImage derivatives which should do the job in a convenient way.

Besides its always a good idea to use some partitioning tool (e.g. Partition Wizard Boot CD) before returning the drive as DOA, just for doublecheck, especially on commissioning >= 2TB drives and having an old BIOS, i.e. non UEFI.

[6233638]

These are free Acronis TrueImage derivatives which should do the job in a convenient way.

I already own the latest version of Acronis, and it was no use in backing up the drives.

Besides its always a good idea to use some partitioning tool (e.g. Partition Wizard Boot CD) before returning the drive as DOA, just for doublecheck, especially on commissioning >= 2TB drives and having an old BIOS, i.e. non UEFI.

It's a Sandy Bridge system (P67) so I have no issues with high capacity drives - I have three 4TB disks in there, and the other WD20EARX they sent works.

But thank you for the suggestions.

[newsposter]

I did not want to say anything but those "reconditioned" drives are drive others have sent back under RMA and they have used a util (like HDS) to re-initialise the surface, recheck for errors, put a new sticker on it and ship it back out (with the wty on your original disk - so they don't have to last too long).  That said, I've never had a EARX fail.

That's not how it's done.

Factory refurb drives are hooked up to a post-mgt test/format machine just as though it was fresh off the line.  The test rigs perform actual surface scan and reformatting that can't be done through the sata interface.

When you 'format' or reinitialize a modern ata or sata drive through the user interface (ata or sata) the drives firmware just soaks up the formatting commands and sends back dummy acks or code zero (completed) statuses.  The FAT or RFMT tables do get zeored out and bad sectors are virtualized, but no real surface formatting is done to the platters.

[jmone]

You could be right on what tools/methods are used to recertify the surface - I got my info from the Author of HDS - http://www.hdsentinel.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1548

Anyway - regardless of the method, if you get a re-certified drive it was someone's else RMA in a previous life.    About half my returns are re-certified drives the other half are new stock.

[6233638]

Well my replacement for the dead replacement drive turned up a few days ago, and I just finished full write/read surface tests on it.
Started moving the files off my backup drive…



Just my luck.

Already lost one file so far. (CRC error)
Hopefully I won't have to re-rip too many discs. Fortunately they are all Blu-rays, so I won't have to be swapping out hundreds of discs at least, I guess…

[InflatableMouse]

Do you let your drives get on room temperature before hooking them up?

I'm not saying that's your issue but its good practice for sure.

[6233638]

Do you let your drives get on room temperature before hooking them up?
I'm not saying that's your issue but its good practice for sure.

Yes, I do. I'm surprised to see a drive fail so quickly, considering that I did full write/read tests on it when it was new (usually you are good if it can pass that) but that's just how my luck seems to be with hardware. (PCs, AV gear etc. doesn't seem to matter…)

[InflatableMouse]

Unless you believe in karma (I don't) you really are unlucky ....   

[newsposter]

Just for giggles, have you tried resetting all of the drive cables and/or using other controller ports.

It's not unheard of for cables to get flakey, connections to get corroded, or controller channels to go bad.

[6233638]

Just for giggles, have you tried resetting all of the drive cables and/or using other controller ports.

It's not unheard of for cables to get flakey, connections to get corroded, or controller channels to go bad.

I actually did that when fitting the new drive, but the one that started showing errors today is an external USB3 drive which died. (and I've tried a couple of other cables)

[6233638]

Well, looks like it may have been the motherboard at fault?

System won't boot, and is showing the VGA fault LED. Tried multiple GPUs and different PCI-E slots, so it seems that the motherboard has died.

Now I need to find a suitable Z77 board quickly. (Requires 8 SATA ports)
Preferably not ASUS, after having so many issues with this Sabertooth P67.

EDIT: After looking at the prices for boards with the connectivity that I require, I think this might be an opportunity to upgrade to Haswell. It just doesn’t seem cost effective to replace. (I am not going to wait another month for an RMA)