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Hard disk repairing/recycling

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Pentium100:

--- Quote from: x5ga on November 06, 2010, 07:45:43 PM ---Windows does spin down the drive, but I have music playing in the background off that HDD for a long time (almost 24/7), so, at least the uptime (yes, the raw data) is wrong, in my opinion - not that this makes the drive less likely to fail.

--- End quote ---
AFAIK, Windows has predictive cache, so in your case it would read the music file that's playing and spin down the drive if the file is long enough.

I usually set Windows to never spin down the drives. One of my older hard drives has 44496h of usage and only 332 power cycles. A newer drive has 36626 hours and 123 cycles.


--- Quote ---I'll just backup the data somewhere and then copy some non-critical data onto the disk and put it in a closet somewhere safe. Maybe I'll try formatting it and running spinrite and/or HDDregenerator, it probably can't hurt...

--- End quote ---
Good idea! Run MHDD then Spinrite. MHDD can scan (and erase) the drive faster than Spinrite, which tries to restore the data that's on the drive. MHDD in scan mode should report to you how many bad sectors this drive has. A few of them is not a problem, but watch carefully to see if the number grows with use.

x5ga:

--- Quote from: Pentium100 on November 06, 2010, 09:08:40 PM ---
--- Quote from: x5ga on November 06, 2010, 07:45:43 PM ---Windows does spin down the drive, but I have music playing in the background off that HDD for a long time (almost 24/7), so, at least the uptime (yes, the raw data) is wrong, in my opinion - not that this makes the drive less likely to fail.

--- End quote ---
AFAIK, Windows has predictive cache, so in your case it would read the music file that's playing and spin down the drive if the file is long enough.

I usually set Windows to never spin down the drives. One of my older hard drives has 44496h of usage and only 332 power cycles. A newer drive has 36626 hours and 123 cycles.

--- End quote ---

Even with the predictive cache, it wouldn't account for the 10000+ hours the drive should have had, and I disable the spin-down too... The drive must be reporting its uptime erroneously...

I'll backup the data first thing in the morning and then run MHDD and spinrite, hopefully it'll magically make the drive OK for a while at least :P I'll keep track of the bad sectors also. This is the first Western Digital drive that has caused me problems, and I have ≈8 of them running, one of them has 110000h uptime and has zero problems. Maybe this one was from a 'less-than-good' batch or something.

Pentium100:

--- Quote from: x5ga on November 06, 2010, 09:35:59 PM ---one of them has 110000h uptime and has zero problems. Maybe this one was from a 'less-than-good' batch or something.

--- End quote ---

Nice, 12.5 years. That long ago, I could not leave my PC on all the time...

Also, the drive may report something else and not hours in that SMART attribute. Maybe it's 870 days :) Check it today and tomorrow and see how much it changes...

1547 power cycles is still a lot, on average, your drive was turned on at once every 17 hours during those 3 years. Normal for regular PC, but not for one that's on 24/7.

fohfoh:
I have a similar drive that does the same thing. However, mine was in an external enclosure and writing data when it was knocked off the table by my dog.

It "works" now, but not really. I merely use it in my HTPC to drop files to play off of because it's faster than the 1TB WD Green installed. I don't trust it, but it was my fault that it was like that... Not WD's fault.

I concur though. SMART means nothing. I've done disc scans etc that say that WD is perfectly fine, but it's not. Even trying to install ubuntu on it yields poor results. (Failure)

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