Seagate external 1TB randomly stops working until reboot

soliunasm · 22 Sep 2014

I'm having a bit of trouble regarding my external hard drive, not sure if it's failing or not. I've had it about 4 years now, use it every day, and as of a couple months back it's started acting up on me. I always have it connected to the USB 3.0 slots on the back of my tower(It's 3.0 compatible), and I switch which port it's in on occasion along with taking it to other places. The drive itself is a Seagate Backup Plus 1TB drive for Windows, and I completely formatted it a month ago to see if it would fix my problems. It didn't.

Alright, onto the problem. At random points in time the drive just stops. For example, I could be watching a video file I stuck on it and it just freezes on a frame and that's it, MPC-HD just straight up crashes. Or I could be transferring something over and it just dies mid-transfer with the transfer window going on for an infinite amount of time and I have to forcibly close things down. This is where the real problems start.

1. The hard drive is acted on as if it's still in use by the computer. It shows up in My Computer, it shows how much space is left, I can go through all the hard drive and all its folders, and any files loaded by a program prior to the stopping of the hard drive will still work up until where the hard drive just stopped.
For example, let's say I'm watching video1 and I switch to video2. Half way through video2 the hard drive just stops. If I double-click video1 it will play exactly how it did prior to the crash, but video2 will either not load at all or only go up to the point where the hard drive stopped.

2. Any files on the hard drive are still there, but once it has stopped the only files that show up are the ones in the current folder, the root of the hard drive, whatever folders lead you to your current in-use folder, and then just folders that link to other folders. Nothing else will load.

3. I cannot safely remove the hard drive, it's just not possible. If I log off then log back on, it gives me a bunch of write errors and still won't let me touch the hard drive.

4. If I manually just pull the thing out of the tower, the computer still thinks it exists. It still shows up under My Computer, it still shows the files that it has cached I believe, I can still run video1 for example, and still go into any of the other folders.

The only way I've been able to fix it so far is by restarting the computer which brings everything back just fine, but it takes like ten minutes every time it does this. It's not a frequent thing, maybe once every week or so, but it's still enough to annoy me. I've run chkdsk on it along with its repair function but it turns up nothing, I haven't tried Seagate's own tool but I plan on doing that, and Googling a bit has brought up some things saying to try putting it in a USB 2.0 slot. I just want to know if this is going to die soon or not. This is my fifth Seagate to give me problems in oh so many years, so if I do end up having to get another hard drive, would anyone have a recommendation?

MrNeeds · 23 Sep 2014

soliunasm said:

I'm having a bit of trouble regarding my external hard drive, not sure if it's failing or not. I've had it about 4 years now, use it every day, and as of a couple months back it's started acting up on me. I always have it connected to the USB 3.0 slots on the back of my tower(It's 3.0 compatible), and I switch which port it's in on occasion along with taking it to other places. The drive itself is a Seagate Backup Plus 1TB drive for Windows, and I completely formatted it a month ago to see if it would fix my problems. It didn't.

Alright, onto the problem. At random points in time the drive just stops. For example, I could be watching a video file I stuck on it and it just freezes on a frame and that's it, MPC-HD just straight up crashes. Or I could be transferring something over and it just dies mid-transfer with the transfer window going on for an infinite amount of time and I have to forcibly close things down. This is where the real problems start.

1. The hard drive is acted on as if it's still in use by the computer. It shows up in My Computer, it shows how much space is left, I can go through all the hard drive and all its folders, and any files loaded by a program prior to the stopping of the hard drive will still work up until where the hard drive just stopped.
For example, let's say I'm watching video1 and I switch to video2. Half way through video2 the hard drive just stops. If I double-click video1 it will play exactly how it did prior to the crash, but video2 will either not load at all or only go up to the point where the hard drive stopped.

2. Any files on the hard drive are still there, but once it has stopped the only files that show up are the ones in the current folder, the root of the hard drive, whatever folders lead you to your current in-use folder, and then just folders that link to other folders. Nothing else will load.

3. I cannot safely remove the hard drive, it's just not possible. If I log off then log back on, it gives me a bunch of write errors and still won't let me touch the hard drive.

4. If I manually just pull the thing out of the tower, the computer still thinks it exists. It still shows up under My Computer, it still shows the files that it has cached I believe, I can still run video1 for example, and still go into any of the other folders.

The only way I've been able to fix it so far is by restarting the computer which brings everything back just fine, but it takes like ten minutes every time it does this. It's not a frequent thing, maybe once every week or so, but it's still enough to annoy me. I've run chkdsk on it along with its repair function but it turns up nothing, I haven't tried Seagate's own tool but I plan on doing that, and Googling a bit has brought up some things saying to try putting it in a USB 2.0 slot. I just want to know if this is going to die soon or not. This is my fifth Seagate to give me problems in oh so many years, so if I do end up having to get another hard drive, would anyone have a recommendation?

Sounds like the arm is starting to wear down, the arm is the part that reads the platter and is only rated for a certain number of movements in it's lifetime, I think it maybe time for a replacement.

Here's a video explaining how hard drives work and you can see the parts I mentioned in the video

SevSaint · 23 Sep 2014

Ya i would begin backing up what you can ASAP before it fails and becomes totally useless.
Also consider replacing with a SSD. They are more expensive, but since its less mechanics involved in the functionality of the drive your less likely to run into problems later on.

Mark Phelps · 24 Sep 2014

I have been using Seagate drives for years and found them to be (historically) very reliable Then suddenly, a few weeks back, they started dying on me! I had a 2TB Barracuda drive that had presented no problems, fail and crash suddenly.

No attempts at data rescue were successful. I ended up sending it to a local data recovery shop, and they indicated that only hardware rebuilding would make the drive workable again.

So, try to get data off the drive as soon as you can; otherwise, you'll lose everything on it -- like I did!

soliunasm · 28 Sep 2014

Thanks everyone for the responses. I noticed that when I moved it from my USB 3.0 slot to a 2.0 it seemed to stop the random crashing, but to be on the safe side I might pick up another hard drive soon.