Hi!

Over the last weeks, I noticed, that my external HDD (Intenso, actual HDD is Seagate Barracuda 3TB) had some struggles. I used it as a media center (Rassberry Pi/LibreELEC) storage and during watching any video or listening to music it hanged periodically. First after every 10 minutes, then about 5 minutes. But after stopping the playback and then starting over (which took some minutes) it played the same place in the video fine, so it did not appear as corrupted data.

Because it happened after upgrading LibreELEC, I first did not suspect external HDD, but after I made sure the culprit is HDD, I bought another HDD, to copy all available to the new drive.

I use Ubuntu as my desktop, where I make a copy of the old HDD. Actually, I mounted both disks to my desktop Ubuntu and ssh-d into it from my laptop and make all procedures from the shell. For copying, I use Midnight Commander.

I list some more symptoms I noticed:

• when powering HDD, it starts fine and does not make any suspicious noises, no clicks, no troubles with head positioning, as far as I can tell. On copying it is also pretty quiet, I don't hear anything disturbing, even when it fails to read some file.
• when I removed HDD from its external box and tried to use it from my external HDD caddy for two SATA disks, the system did not detect the disk correctly. With cfdisk it showed partition as 2TB and I was not able to mount it at all.
• When mounted from its own box as a USB3 device, it mostly works. But on some files transfer speed slows and slows until one moment it fails to read and the disk's mount directory becomes completely empty. After such failure, I switch the disk's power off, unmount it, after a while (at least some minutes) I switch power on again and mount the disk again. So far it is worked.
• After first failing copy I remounted the disk and tried to copy the failed file again. It did not succeed, but the disk remained mounted. So after this, I have not tried to retry failed files, I just skipped them so far.
• I have copied so far about 1TB data and about 3-5 files are failed. On best files copying speed is more than 100MB/s, but it goes down on many files to even less than 10MB/s. Midnight Commander shows an average speed for this copying cycle of about 37 MB/s.
• I have a little suspicion that failures increase when HDD warms up (too much).

What may be the reason for such failures? Is this disc beyond reasonable recovery?

I have not run yet any diagnostic tools or bad block mapper on this disc, I try first copy away as much data I can. What are your suggestions?

Wbr,

Gunnar

I have now run for 88 hours, but I have not got any output. I run it as:

Same time it uses 100% CPU time whole time (htop output):

It seems strange to me, but now it is run almost 4 days without any change on indication of progress.

I think I let it run more few hours before I cancel.

Something seems wrong, but what? Why I don't get any output? Before this I run it took about 20 hours to map bad blocks but after that it gave a lot of errors and afte 15-20 min I bored to answer <y> to all of them, so I cancelled this run and tried again with options listed above. After that I have not got anything for output.

TIA,

Gunnar