Hello everyone. I wanted to get some advice on something. I have a Seagate Barracuda hard drive, specifically a 2TB ST2000DM001 that I have a been using as my main hard drive for something like 5 plus years. The drive worked fine up until a couple weeks ago when it began to decline in performance. At first it manifested itself as very brief random pauses that was only apparent when watching videos or performing any kind of operation where a constant stream of data was being read like copying. It was consistent but not frequent enough to be considered alarming so I assumed it was some problem with my OS, perhaps some kind of service I installed by accident or part of the operation of some wayward program I installed. I more or less ignored the problem. As the days went on the pauses started becoming more and more frequent which eventually began affecting productivity significantly. Everything was running slowly. Applications would take long to start, videos would stutter constantly. It was painful. It was around here I was suspecting the hard drive but I wasn't willing to proceed under that assumption as I had a similar HD before. It was 1 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12, ST3100528AS that lasted something like 15 years before it failed. I was certainly not expecting this one to fail so early. So I did a full re-install of Windows 10, expecting the problem to go away. It didn't. What happened after was that the problem rabidly accelerated to the point where the system was barely usable. I then replaced the drive with a lower capacity 250 GB SSD drive.

At this time I started the process of trying to recover my data from the failing Barracuda drive and this is where I am having some problems. The drive had become excruciatingly slow. It has an average transfer rate of something like a few kilobytes per second with long periods where Windows reports a rate of 0 bytes per second being copied. I've been able to recover some smaller pieces of data like programs I've been writing and a few text files. But there are a couple folders that are gigabytes in size that I would like to recover and these ridiculously slow transfer rates is a huge problem for that. I mean it took an entire 2 hours to recover 1 MB of data from the drive.

I've download a number of programs to run tests on the drive and the odd thing is that for the most part, all these tools report no problems with the drive. The SMART tests as far as I can tell have found no problem with the drive. The drive itself makes no odd noises, not even the clicking that is typical of these mechanical drives when they are close to failure. Only one test I performed on it has ever failed which is something called a Short DST test, an option found on one of Seagate's Hard Disk diagnostic tools. All in all, every test I perform tell me that the drive is fine. The only problem is the slow transfer rate.

I'm at my wits end with this and I'm trying to figure out what I can do to recover my data. Sending it to specialists its out of the question because for one, I cannot afford the extravagant prices and even if I could, where I live, these kinds of services are far out of reach. It has to be a solution I can do myself. So can anyone give me any ideas?

Thank you.

Hi

First of all, why did you format and re-install windows to a drive that has useful data inside? Or did you install windows to some other drive?

Secondly, as you can see your drive is dying. Fast. Hammering it with all shorts of tests does NOT help it. It is just dying faster because you're simply pushing it off the cliff.

There are several reasons for your drive's behavior, with top on the list being a weak/dying/dead head. Or more than one. If that is correct, there aren't many things you can do on yourself.

As always, before proceeding a few words of warning:
If the question "can I move on with my life without my data" answers with NO, unplug your drive and send it to a data recovery professional.
If the quesion answers with YES, then:

Search this forum for Seagate Terminal connection, buy a TTL cable for $5, connect it to your drive and show us terminal output here.
There might be a way we can help you to speed the drive up, but as I've said this can cost you your data. For ever.
You also need to prepare using a linux machine with HDDSuperClone installed and ready with a destination drive, if all goes well.

EDIT: A Grenada drive lasting 5 years. Wow!

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and an ST1000528AS for 15
they were in production around 2010-2012... so it wasn't 'that' long time ago.

I second every word Northwind said above. Just consider wether there's a chance you may repent your current decision in a few years. You might be able to spare some money for a decent recovery service.

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

I didn't format anything. I just re-installed Windows.



My specialties in the IT field is networking and programming. When it comes to data storage, I'm dumb as a box of rocks. Data recovery is not something I've ever dabbled in. I've learned more about how storage technologies like Hard Drives work in the last week than I ever learned in the last 20 years in this field. I really don't know anything about what to do when things like this happen. You see, I've never seen a hard disk fail like this before. I'm used to seeing very specific signs, usually the BIOS or OS having trouble identifying the drive or clicking noises which normally gives me enough time to save my stuff before it's totally dead. Also, this is the first time in a very long time that HD failure has caught me without backups of my large data sets. I'm normally very OCD about backing up stuff but the experience with the high reliability with Barracuda Drives over the last decade has seen me slacking off in my back up practices. As I've said, I wasn't expecting this drive to fail for at least another 5 years.



I'll have to send the drive away(out of the country) for data recovery and I hear it's very expensive. That's out of the question.

I've since decided to make do with what I have. The drive has settled into a transfer rate of around 16 KB/s so I have downloaded a copying program that can run in the background and is capable of resuming operations after being interrupted. I'll just let it run constantly to recover my data. At that transfer rate, it could take months to recover all the stuff I want to save but it's better than having no choice at all. I've already recovered some very important folders this way.



This actually sounds quite interesting. I can't do that now because those components may have to be imported and given the state of the world right now, imports are kind of iffy. Lots of folks where I'm from having a lot of delays with imports right now. I'd definitely like to look into this though. Both my Barracuda drives aren't flat dead yet so I will keep them for some time so I can revisit this terminal thing later on.



You're probably right. That Barracuda drive lived through so much in my life it felt like forever lol. I mean that drive out lasted at least 2 PCs and I don't tend to upgrade PCs very often. Hell, I have good friends in my life that haven't been with me as long as that drive. That drive is to this day the most reliable hard drive I have ever had by far. I always swear by these drives and I always recommend them to people. The SSD I'm using now is just temporary, I do plan on obtaining another Barracuda drive as soon as I can.