Imminent Hard Drive Failure - Recommendations please?

martinlest · 18 Jul 2013

I am suddenly getting a warning that one of my Hard Drives is about to fail. It is a 1TB Spinpoint 3 that I have had for about 3 years. I installed 'Hard Disk Sentinel' to check the information Windows is giving me, and this gives me the same basic report:

"Failure Predicted - Attribute: 1 Raw Read Error Rate, Errors occurred while reading raw data from a disk. Indicate problem with the disk surface or the read/write heads. There are 793 weak sectors found on the disk surface. They may be remapped any time in the later use of the disk. Replace hard disk immediately".

So I guess the information is reliable and I need to buy a new disc, right? Will re-formatting it and/or running DiskCheck (with recover bad sectors) help? Anything else I can do?

Assuming the answer is 'no', what would folks recommend as a good, not-too-expensive disc (available in the UK) to replace the failing one? Fortunately it's a disc I use just for backups, albeit important ones, not a disc with the O/S or similar on it. I thought these Samsung discs were supposed to be reliable...

Thanks,

Martin

jumanji · 18 Jul 2013

For backups I would always recommend a powered external HDD on the table top, which will never - as far as possible - never removed, and switched on only when backup is required. ( Look for an on-off switch on the drive, so that you need not connect and disconnect the drive to the PC every time to bring it into action )

(The reason is an internal drive will keep spinning all the time (needlessly) and thus reduce its lifetime and imminent early failure.)

Immediately backup all your files to the external drive.

Britton30 · 18 Jul 2013

Here's some good Seagate Enterprise class drives, intended to run 27/7. You might see if your Samsung drive has some warranty left, some of them had 5YRs on them.

martinlest · 19 Jul 2013

Hi. I already have important data on the 'failing' drive double backed-up on an external USB HDD, though to be fair I have had a lot more external HDDs fail than internal ones.

Yes, I thought of the warranty first thing this morning - I just contacted Amazon and after some persuasion, they are replacing it free of charge. Doesn't usually seem to work that way, that an item fails just within its warranty period!

Thanks.