Hi you experts. For he past 2 days I am having issues with a hard drive and I would like to know if this drive is slowly dying.
First the setup its a Vmware guest running on a Windows server. The disk is an external disk and was passed through as physical and there were no issues first to access them.
Later I discovered that on trying to read some files the disk did no longer react. I saw however hdd led activity for this particular disk but it simply did not come up with anything. Furthermore it led the entire VM to be no longer responsive.
The disk does not make any weird noises and I don't see a Windows warning that there are issues with reading or writing.

The only thing that I had noticed is that upon plugin the disk into the server there was a failure to properly install it. The disk appeard as raw disk only in the disk management and the device manager.

Now what I am wondering is if you think this failed installation could be the cause to have this weird read behavior in the VM or if it is a slowly dying drive that I have to replace. I am bit scared to do some testing stress on it just in case the drive is close to death.

Hi! Maybe It has some bad sectors or weak head (s). What kind of disk is it? SATA, SAS, SCSI? First of all i recommend not to use it any more and backup all important data. Second you can check SMART info to see if there is something wrong. Can you upload SMART result?

Best

F

Hi thank you for your answer.

It is a Samsung 1500. Smart shows as follows and I noticed it shows it a "Caution":

ID Cur Wor Thr RawValues(6) Attribute Name
01 _92 _92 __6 00000ADD2EA1 Read Error Rate
03 _98 _92 __0 000000000000 Spin-Up Time
04 100 100 _20 0000000001AA Start/Stop Count
05 _92 _92 _36 000000000159 Reallocated Sectors Count
07 _78 _60 _30 000004288F95 Seek Error Rate
09 _89 _89 __0 000000002687 Power-On Hours
0A 100 100 _97 000000000001 Spin Retry Count
0C 100 100 _20 000000000057 Power Cycle Count
B8 100 100 _99 000000000000 End-to-End Error
BB __1 __1 __0 0000000001A3 Reported Uncorrectable Errors
BC 100 _98 __0 001400150019 Command Timeout
BD __8 __8 __0 00000000005C High Fly Writes
BE _62 _39 _45 0100271D0026 Airflow Temperature
C2 _38 _61 __0 001300000026 Temperature
C3 _41 _25 __0 00000ADD2EA1 Hardware ECC recovered
C5 100 100 __0 000000000361 Current Pending Sector Count
C6 100 100 __0 000000000361 Uncorrectable Sector Count
C7 200 200 __0 000000000000 UltraDMA CRC Error Count
F0 100 253 __0 F7E5000024C7 Head Flying Hours
F1 100 253 __0 0000E95890CA Total Host Writes
F2 100 253 __0 0000AC6BEB58 Total Host Reads

In case a head is getting weak what backup would you think is better: Sector by sector or file based?

This drive is dying, definitely has bad sectors and possible weak head. If the data is important, seek professional data recovery now!!!

If the data is not important enough for you to seek professional data recovery and you wish to try yourself (and risk loosing all your data and making it impossible for professional recovery), then you would need to do a sector by sector backup using somthing like ddrescue (version 1.19 or newer is recommended) or the newer but not yet as popular (but claimed to be better) HDDSuperClone. Because the drive contains a virtual machine it is going to be more complicated to recover data. If the virtual machine is all one big file then maybe not too difficult depending on how many bad sectors, but if it has snapshots and is spread over multiple files then it could be very difficult to recover data from within that virtual machine. If you can get a good clone without too many bad sectors in the wrong places, you might get lucky.

Good luck!

_________________
http://www.hddsuperclone.com
Home of HDDSuperClone

Those SMART attributes look like Seagate's, not Samsung's.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thank you for all theh answers so far.

I think you are right and it is a Seagate.


The virtual machine is not on the disk itself. Basically it is a read only external disk with data that does not get changed but those data were accessed through the VM. If I try to rescue data myself and this causes to loose all data then I don't think it is a good idea.
But I don't have the money for a professional data recovery. I am sorry if this sounds really dumb, but in case it is a weak head, can they swap heads and make everything readible again? And what would be a fair price for that?
As I don't have the money at this time anyway, do you think I could just wait, if I don't use the disk at all or would even that make everything worse?

Yes, if you need the data and do not have the money, stop playing with the drive, store it safely in a good place, and wait until you can collect the necessary $$.

The disk will not degenerate that much in the time it remains stored.

Dear tompson, I strongly recommend you not to change heads by yourself. That proccess requieres advance skills and specific equipment. DIY consecuences are highly documented in this forum.

Best!

F

Thank you so much for this answer. I am less worried now and will do so.


Thanks for your strong advice which is much appreciated. I have learned a lot throuhgh here about drives and would never never open it on my own or try to repair something. So no need to worry about that. Ill just leave it like it is and try to collect the money to get it fixed.