I recently had problems with 2 mechanical hard drives a 320gb toshiba sata hdd and a Seagate 7tb 3.5 hard drive.

These drives are both mechanical. Both in external drive cases and connected by usb 3 cables to my daily driver laptop. Windows has been telling me i need to scan the 320gb for literally years. I finally scanned it a year or so ago, and once the file structure was repaired, imaged it to a new drive, in the old case.

Well the problem came back. The problem with scanning is if the file structure is broken, windows can't fix it and just moves the files to a "found" folder and you have to sort them or delete them manually.

This time I ran HDD Regenerator on them to scan and repair any bad blocks on the drive. I did this on a separate computer I keep for doing backups and drive repairs and imaging, this process can take a long time on big drives - the 7 tb required 16hours to scan and repair and I ran it twice stopping and taking a break to let the drive cool down between runs and to see if any problems returned or new ones arose.

The 7tb had been unplugged or powered down by accident several times and was giving me CRC errors and not letting me delete corrupt files from windows. After running HDD regenerator (twice) the bad blocks were fixed. I then let windows scan the drive and it found 3 directories it couldn't deal with (total about 50mb - mostly mp3's - I put them back where they belonged, and its all good.

The 320gb, turned out the external case was having problems with intermittent contact of the cables, so I pulled the drive put it in a new case and did the same routine, but after scanning no lost files were found and it works great as well.

For long term storage or for drives that take a lot of read write cycles, I prefer mechanical hard drives because, they will warn you long before they fail in most instances unless you have a catastrophic head crash which is very rare as the heads are built to self park in a safe zone when power is removed, so its only when a component fails structurally that the head crashes, or maybe if you throw it against a wall while its powered up and spinning.

I use SSD's a lot , I have a half dozen computers where the system drive is an ssd. I also have backup images of all those drives.

I have had 2 ssd fail in 10 years, they don't seem to give much warning and when they fail, they either are not addressable at all, so no way to get info off them, or they degrade in a matter of hours making removing files very hit or miss.

so my take away., external cases are easy to repair. Hard drives are much more forgiving when errors occur and SSD's are a mixed blessing that are wonderful until they fail and then your basically fucked.

it would be nice if SSD could be designed with a fall over mode, when memory chips start failing to write to a protected area and send messages to the o/s to replace drive immediately , it would make it easier to trust them for important info.

My daily driver laptop still has a HDD in it and its mostly for the web and watching movies on the projector. I can put up with a little longer boot time, as long as its always there when its time to watch a movie on the big screen...

 

no don't carry them around with me, they're on the coffee table in the living room. I have used HDD regenerator since 2012 when I purchased it to repair drives installed in medical equipment for hospitals. If the drive is failing it will keep getting more bad blocks, the more it is scanned. I know this from using it for a decade or more. For hospitals I would err on the side of caution and image the failing drive and rewrite the image to a new drive. A lot, lets face it, almost all hospitals have no idea where their original installation discs and software are, so without the drive, the equipment is out of service. Being able to replace them and have them up and running in 24/48 hours is a blessing for all involved.

The 7tb drive is less than a year old, so i knew it probably wasn't damaged, just the file system was corrupt, but windows doesn't do a proper job of repairing file systems from my expereience. Once I had the low level drive structure sorted out, windows worked on the file system with no problems, I took the do not fix sector errors option, cause it takes forever and if you interupt it, it can't read the drive and will ask to reformat it.

HDD Regenerator is now about 80$ if I remember correctly and they say it can work with SSDs now, but I haven't upgraded as the upgrade price is the same as the purchase price. Still it has been a life save for me on many occasions...

I wish they had made a usb spec that allowed for locking cables like E-Sata, that would solve a lot of problems.

 

HDDs are a decent choice if you're planning to keep backups stored at home or whatever. I'd never use them for travelling tho, I use an external SSD with a hardcase for travelling and performing. But yeah, both have pros and cons definitely.

 

one more pro tip, check your drives once in a while....

after repairing mine I opened CrystalDiskInfo and saw this:




if my math is correct, this drive has been in service about 7 years, so I guess its time to replace it...
really gave me my monies worth though. replacement was 1tb, toshiba 25$ new... amazon
goes into service tomorrow..


its the power on hours that got to me....
if anybody wants it, i'll let this one go for 75$ plus shipping, must have 800 credit rating or better...

 

yeah that 320 gb drive might be 15 years old now, it is amazing that you got anything off it

 

dude is that bad? Windows tells me i need to scan all of my HDDs,though i've never had any problem with any of them yet

 

the light of the hd stays on for a few seconds after ejecting the drive on my computer.
the computer says it's safe to eject the hd but the disc still spinning
after reading @ArticStorm comment i realize that this might be the cause of the "windows faulty disk" problem

 

most probably the control board in the case. I had a 3TB drive give the same type of problem, took the drive out to check in a HD Dock problem gone, bought a new external case problem fixed, it's been a few years now and the drive is still working, I think the problem comes from plugging and unpluging the USB cable the socket gets loose and contacts get worn. A good USB 3 case is about $35, not expensive to save your drive. I Use the drive for backup so it doesn't get used very often.

 

Last edited: May 10, 2024

Got anything off it? I'm still running it,

waiting for the replacement from Amazon. I have it backed up , if it fails soo be it..

 

physical disks have mass and therefore due to inertia don't stop immediately, they spin down. Decades ago some bright bulb designed a setup, I think its spring loaded, where once power is lost, the spring retracts the heads to a safe, parked positiion where they can't crash against anything.

so you're good safety wise on the hardware, the software isn't as smart, as has been mentioned, due to cacheing and other deleayed writes to the hard drive, the data can become corrupt or the logical structure that describes where the data is stored.

Thats what windows wants to do when it "repairs" or "scans" a disk, it tries to rebuild the indexes and directory structures.
hence the creation of the Found.000, Found.001 etc folders when it fails to figure out where the data goes cause it can't repair the index or directory listing, it just dumps the data in a folder and wags its tail "look what I found" and waits for a pat on the head.

Windows is sorted of the bipolar retreiver of the operating system world, it wants to please you while shitting on the carpet and peeing on your porn mags...