is my hard drive failing?
 

my computer started to freeze up and then restarted itself and went into checkdisk and said

truncating badly linked attribute records from file record segement 139805. it went through the checkdisk and restarted. i checked to see if C was dirty but it said it wasn't. should i be worried?

I wouldn't put my trust in that drive anymore.

Make a backup, try reformatting hdd and put new win.

If you still have the same problems, buy new hdd!

i was actually in the process of buying a new computer anyways

do you think its stupid to have 1 regular hard drives and 1 ssd? is that pointless?

No, SSD for OS boot.

HDD is used for data and storage.

Yep. Just remember to check it regularly. Don't expect to get more than 2-3 years out of a drive, I just had my data drive fail and I didn't notice it going out cause I don't boot from there so I didn't see how long the seek times were getting.

I managed to save the data in time but felt dumb I didn't see that coming, drive was over 3 years old and should have been replaced long ago.

i've never had a drive fail *knock on wood* this one is almsot 6 years old..

It sounds like a failing drive to me. Stop using it immediately. Get a replacement HDD and backup your data ASAP. When it comes to hard drives, spare no expense and go with the best ... Western Digital Black. Avoid Seagate, it's crap.

i thought HD only have a 10 year life? max?

someone lied to you.

i don't know but my girlfriends piece of crap desktop is nearly 10 years old. my parents have some ancient windows 95 system they still use, god knows how old that thing is.

Well if each sector is the size of a nickel it might be pretty sturdy, who knows.

A hard drive can fail at ANY TIME from the day you buy the computer on. I have drives that are 15 years old and still function. I don't use them for anything important of course.

Backing up is essential because it's only a matter of time...they all fail simply because they have mechanical parts. Hell, even ram can fail and it's totally electronic.

The price of SSDs is going down all the time and just as ram used to be very $$$ it's dirt cheap...so too will SSDs follow the same trend. I saw a 1 gig SSD for $475 being advertised on Amazon so that shows you how much they have come down already.

Soon the hd as we know it will only be used in 3rd world countries and the SSD will to standard in all computers.

i always use wd but is blue any good?

Thats my set up. So fast, so clean, no failure.:thumbsup



I also have a 5 bay raid system, 3 tars per bay hooked up with a thunderbolt cable.


Very solid, very reliable.


Keep in mind, i can't got to my clients and give the; "My hard drive with all of you content crashed, sorry dude". That one instance would murder my name and reputation.



I run a Mac OSx system. I also have a raid system 5 bay fire wire 800 and a 5 bay raid system networked with its own IP addy so I can access it and move what ever to where ever from anywhere.


Seems like overkill, but I have heard serious hard drive crash horror stories that i could not afford.



Just Dave

If your data is worth anything to you there is no such thing as overkill when it comes to redundancy and hardware.

Two types of people in the world. Those that have had a hard drive fail on them and those thatcher going to have a hard drive fail on them.

I have a dupe of my drive on an external drive and a copy and f that on another external drive and that is also backed up in the cloud using crash plan. As hdds are so cheap nowadays I have no idea why people don't back up properly.

i thought the problem with ssd is that it can only be written to a x number of times before it fails?

get a new comp

as in too much or too little?

quick google shows something like 5 years before failure becomes constant.. but that seems really short

A drive can last 1 day or 10 years...it can be a crapshoot. If you've ever seen the mechanics of what goes on inside, you'd realize its a miracle it works for any amount of time.

Possible how hard drive is failing but it could be also failing power supply - failing hard drive and bad power supply are usually connected as one thing lead to another scenario.

no doubt. i will admit i am lazy and never really made a real back up. i would just copy files to external hard drives. my new computer will have 2 drives, one main drive and another that will (hopefully) auto back up every 12-24 hours as well as use an external drive for an additional backup.

so what are so good (possibly free) backup software programs?

I use Acronis Backup, and its worth the 50 bucks to have peace of mind.

Yep your drive failed but fixed itself.

It could go forever but 90% of the time when this happens it's on the way out. Should have about 2 days to 6 months.

It's not as good, which is why I only buy WD Black. Maybe some others can comment on what brands / models of HDD they use and their experiences with them.

? Both of my SSD drives are still going strong after 2+ years...Crucial m4 and a Corsair Neutron. An SSD failure rate like you talk about was only for the earlier ones...SSDs nowadays last quite awhile.

So agree with this.. And when you buy 1 drive buy 2 (2nd one you can keep around as a backup drive should the first 1 die...
Always have a way to backup your drive. At the first sign of an issue backup.
You could also setup a home NAS (personal cloud) that backs up your files for you should your drive go south. You can restore from the backup image.

yeah seems worth it. is it easy to pull individual files from the back up or is it really one geared for a complete restore?

get a new SSD... well worth $$$

blue is ok black is better.

when it comes to wd its

green
blue
black

first being the cheapest last being the most expensive.

Depends on whether you do differential or incremental backup. What I like about it is the customization options when you set a task so you can exclude file types or over a certain size --- which I'm sure most backup softwares probably do.

The last time I had to retrieve something, it took longer than I wanted but that file was going to make or break a large paycheck.

well if black is more reliable, that's what i'll go with.

I am pretty anal about Hard Drives and backups. I have 4 HDD in my tower, two of which are mirrors of the two primary drives. Each night, both of those drives are incrementally backed up to an external hard drive -- on Saturdays, this drive is backed up to a primary NAS drive. And then every Sunday, the primary NAS drive is backed up to a secondary NAS drive.

It's easy enough with GoodSync: http://www.goodsync.com/

With respect to my main tower, I assign my HDD a 1yr active life -- a depreciation lifespan if you will. I swap my drives out every 6 months, and have for about 15 years. The two primary drives become the two mirror drives after 6 months. And two new main drives are added. After 1 year, the secondary drives are put out to pasture, so to speak, and are used in non-essential things like home media servers, archive storage, etc.

Suffice it to say, I have a LOT of hard drives sitting on the shelves after all these years.

regarding brand, I too am a fan of WD Black. However, I have to say I have never once had a Seagate drive fail. Neither has any WD drive failed. Quantum were a personal favourite years ago as well. The drives that did fail over the years were brands like Maxtor, Hitachi, Fujitsu and some others. Having said that, the quality of Seagate, in my opinion, has dropped noticeably in the last 4 or 5 years, and now I am WD Black exclusively at this point in time. It's just worth the money.

yeah, I have same bad karma when it comes to HDD's... try SSD - kinda solved that problem for me so far *knock on the wood.. and yes, weekly backups to cloud/external drives is a norm...