Hi,
Thanks for the replies!
Quote:
As a general advice : do check the SMART status of all your HDDs regularly. HD Sentinel is excellent for that purpose, with a constant background check and customizable warnings whenever a storage device starts to act up ever-so-slightly, or gets too hot. Doing so you could have caught the first signs of failure on this one and perhaps managed to recover most of its contents, as I did with my own ST3000DM001. (I have another one which is fine so far, but rarely used, and only has movies on it.)
This isn't my first drive that failed - but it's the first fail that I noticed too late. In the past few years I had three other drives failing, all of which I recovered before it became a total loss. Until now I only paid attention to suspicious signs like slow performance, damaged files or unusual noise. Having a software watch the SMART data is screamingly obvious; don't know why I haven't done that earlier. Thanks!
Quote:
Does it click 11 times and spin down?
Short answer: no, it doesn't click anymore. Long answer: Here's what I did until now. I had my PC running over night from wednesday to thursday. During the night it was transcoding about 50GB of video files from another disk to this one. In the morning I noticed that one drive was clicking (so no idea for how many hours it did that already). It was a perfectly regular clicking, about once a second. Although suspicious, I didn't realize how bad the drive was. The video files transcoded perfectly without errors, and my Seagate 8TB SMR Archive drive uses to click on some days, too, and has no issues. So I thought it could be windows messing something up and restarted (it's not the boot drive) which only helped for a few seconds. When I tried to access the disk it took seconds to load the directory. Okay, now even stupid me realized this drive is dying. I unmounted the file system which made it stop clicking (so it was indeed windows?) and with Runtime GetDataBack I started the recovery. It reported lots of unreadable sectors, affecting around 1000 files in the 400GB folder I could copy. Normally I just copy the whole drive but because this seemed worse than any drive that failed before I started with the most important data (which turned out to be a good idea).
At that point I had to leave because I wasn't at home over the weekend so I wanted to continue the recovery on my notebook. However I was unable to get access to it again. Cooling the disk didn't help, Linux didn't work - long story short: I couldn't get access to the drive anymore. It spins up, Windows recognizes it, and then it just hangs. If at all, disk manager shows it as offline. Back home it behaves the same on the PC where I recovered the 400GB.
During these tries I noticed how warm the disk was and that the heat comes from that one chip.
Quote:
Sadly, had the OP gone to a data recovery company straight away when it started clicking, they'd have probably gotten back nearly all data and it likely would have cost $500 or less.
As I said, there's no data on this disk that's worth $500. If there was, I wouldn't have touched the drive anymore after the first suspicious sign! There would be an up-to-date backup, too.
Instead I have a backup that's a few months old and I managed to recover the most important data before it died completely. I perfectly know that without a professional setup my means are very limited as are my chances for any recovery. So why not throw it away? Because I read that it may be possible to get again access to the drive using the serial port but as I said I couldn't find any reports about someone who actually tried it. For me this means that there's a chance to recover more of the data AND to improve my knowledge about recoveries without any risk.
Kind regards,
Max