A SMART test on your hard drive should give you a decent indication of whether you have had only a soft failure or if you are also seeing a hard failure. Crystal Disk Info (freeware) can be very helpful as it gives you a colour coded status for the SMART test results on your drive. If you get a yellow warning on any of your sector count tests, that's a good indication your hard drive is going through a hard failure.

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That makes a lot of sense.

I downloaded the Crystal Disk Info (the 40MB version) and ran it on the external drive but I don't really know what I'm looking for to determine if this is just a 'soft' failure and I can regain some trust in the drive.

Here are the results that came up. I don't see anything in yellow but then I'm not quite sure where I'd look for that either. Does anything in these results give you an indication as to whether this is a soft or hard failure? I assume that if the test said the drive was 'good' then that's a good sign.

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Any thoughts?

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Seeing that I think you've run CHKDSK through PowerShell, I'd suggest backing up the data on your drive, format the drive then see what Crystal Disk Info says again. It is quite promising that your current uncorrectable sectors is lower than worst so I suspect you definitely had some soft failure but formatting the drive and running Crystal Disk Info again may give an idea if there's a hard failure if you still have 100 uncorrectable sectors after the format.

@snufish
Is there a reason why you didn't point out that RAID 5 and 6 need some technical know how that rearadmiral admits he's not quite up to speed on, not to mention very expensive? Sure, you can do software RAID but if you do that for RAID 5 or 6, your performance will really suffer and a decent hardware RAID 5 solution won't be cheap and that's before you buy enterprise drives, which come at a premium too.

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Angry - thanks again for weighing in on this. When I saw in the first scan that there were 100 uncorrectable sectors that really didn't mean anything to me. 100 could have been anywhere from an almost-perfect drive to a drive that was on the verge of complete failure. Thanks for putting that in context.

I should mention though, because it may change your thoughts, that the drive has been powered up recently. I ran PowerShell on Sunday and that took about eight hours. Then on Monday when I was able to recover the 250 GB of data that I hadn't backed up it was powered up so I could do that. I don't know if that makes a difference.

I should also point out that the only thing I'm out here is the cost of a new drive and the time it takes to transfer from the backup drive on to the new drive.

I think what I'll do is transfer everything to the new drive (which has the advantage of being 4 TB rather than the existing drive being 2 TB) and then reformat the old drive and see what comes up.

I think it's fair to say that the only thing I'm trying to avoid here is throwing out a perfectly serviceable 2 TB drive. But, if I'm able to save it that's just icing on the cake because when it failed I fully expected that I would have to toss it anyway.

Snufish - thanks for the suggestion but as Angry Pirate points out this is probably way beyond my technical skills and in terms of cost the only thing I'm out is buying a new drive. I haven't lost any data at all thanks to being careful about backing things up.

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What you did in PowerShell sounds like what I did (using the CHKDSK utility) with a drive that I had a read error from (35,000 hours powered on). After running the CHKDSK repair then formatting the drive, the drive worked perfectly with no read/write errors after that.

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^^ Angry - I did a 'quick' reformat - that took about five seconds - and then ran Crystal Disk again. It showed no change in bad sectors. So I'm currently running a complete reformat. I'm about four hours into that and it looks like I've got another three or so to go.

I'll post what I find.

But, the worst that can happen here is that I have complete drive failure and I was prepared for that to be the outcome anyway. The data loss would be the bigger issue if that happened.

Thanks again for your help Drew and Angry.

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Then I ran a full reformat to see if I could see an improvement and it looks like I didn't. The number of bad sectors hasn't changed.

As I write this I'm copying my backup files onto a new drive. If you were me would you trust the old drive even with 100 bad sectors? Or would you toss it as being unreliable? Does the 'Raw Value" column give any meaningful clues?

Thanks!

Edited by - rearadmiral on 6/24/2020 6:51:00 AM

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That being said, I am still concerned that it still happened after not even 200 hours of being powered on though the age factors you mentioned can work against you as hard drives didn't get hermetic sealing until recently - humidity can be a killer.

Edited by - AngryPirate on 6/24/2020 12:57:09 PM

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I appreciate the assistance with this.

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Since I downloaded Crystal Disk Info to test the drive I was having trouble with it also made sense to check my other external drives. I have a collection of 25 external drives. Most of them are relatively new but a few of them date back close to ten years. Much to my disappointment four of my drives came back with a 'caution.' All of those that had a caution were for the same reason: a bad current pending sector count. What I was able to read about that indicates that these drives are in worse shape than the one that was the subject of this thread. I have everything backed up and I'll continue to use them but it sounds like failure could be imminent on them.

Thanks for the tip. I'll be sure to be a lot more careful in backing up these four drives from now on.

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Even 25 drives make too small a sample to draw conclusive proof from, especially if they're different models.

Edited by - AngryPirate on 7/9/2020 8:31:07 PM

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If you don't have backup made better to get one now.

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I have a USB-powered external drive that still runs smoothly and has run for more hours and been powered on and off more than an internal drive that failed on me.

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cave. Still "readable" today ... try that with "our" data in 20K+ years.

RAID 5 or 6 sounds good ... i have a RAID 6 myself but if you come home one day and see the LEDs from 4 drives ! flashing in sync and you can not

access your system via the html page you start to get a very bad feeling and you have to go to the toilet very fast telling yorself ... this is just a

dream ... this is just a dream

Just for everyone who does not know in a RAID 6 System only 2 drives are allowed to fail in order for the Data still ok (but without security

if 2 drives are dead)

So i prayed to the gods of digital ... hard turned the system off .... and it came back up ok

But now i was forced to do something i refused to do for several months .

Can you guess what ?

Cube

Edited by - cubesnake on 7/14/2020 6:19:09 AM

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You decide to buy the nas you choose. When you are about to install the RAID you are being presented with something not

mentioned anywhere at the shops site. It´s called "volume size limitation" So, whenever you plan to get a BIG nas and you want to

have only one Volume make shure to check its "volume size limitation" ... which can be found on the manufactures homepage as i had to learn.

And there is another thing. Make sure the filesystem matches your needs. I dont know why but eg. if you choose ext4 you may not be able to run

virtual machines ... and converting the filesystem to another can not be done

Cube

Edited by - cubesnake on 7/21/2020 4:22:26 AM

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