Charlie Hoffpauir wrote:
I have a couple of Seagate Hard Drives that Hard Disk Semtinel says
are failing. One is model ST2000DM001 and the other ST3000DM008. I've
removed both from my system and recovered the data, but I'm wondering
if there's anything that can be done to "save" the drives, perhaps as
backups, or is that a useless activity and I should just toss them.
Hard Disk Sentinel says one has an expected life of 5 days, and the
other 16 days. The problems reported are bad sectors, for example, for
the 3 TB drive:
56 bad sectors
3288 bad sectors during self test
4267 errors during data transfer
power on time 587 days, 3 hours
Est remaining lifetime 5 days
total start/stop count 11,804

so, can anything be done for them, or or they scrap.

I scrap drives when they will no longer be detected.

Or when they will no longer spin.

If the drives were on the edge of croaking, they might
make good test beasts for "data recovery software".
Like R-Studio or something.

My guess would be the "expected life of 5 days" is just
bad maths. You would be surprised how long a drive with
a growing error problem will last.

I "retire" drives like that. And use them for test
installs, mainly so I can see just how long they'll
last. I have around 5 drives which are no longer fit
for regular usage, but after 3 to 5 years of doing
test installs on them, they're *still* running.

*******

Back in the 40GB Maxtor drive era, a sick drive would
last around 24 hours. Then, lights out... With those,
you were in serious trouble, unless you religiously
made regular backups. There's no way you could get
the data off before they were gone. I lost two of those,
and my data with them. For some reason, drives are a
little bit better today. If you're half awake. There
are still people who insist on not paying attention
to "hints" their hardware gives them. And your Hard
Disk Sentinel is just the right tool for the job.

(Anything that reads SMART is a start in the right direction.)

Paul