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How to prolong the life of an external hard drive?

In ten years, across several different machines, different companies, and different operating systems I've noticed a trend that external hard drives die long before their internal counterparts. Everyone I've spoken to who has used external hard drives for any period of time has shared the same experience.

At first I thought it was because they are moved a lot more than internal drives, but my laptop internal hard drives seem to last as long as my desktop ones, and I've had the same short lifespan when external drives are never moved.

Is this a known issue? Do external hard drives have substantially shorter lifespans than internal drives? If so, what can be done?

Hard drive works intermittently but stalls on a specific sector

I replaced a hard drive for a client, but they have a lot of family photos on the old one, so I'm trying my best to recover them. The drive powers up, but often doesn't appear in HDClone. Sometimes, however, it does appear and I'm able to follow through to the duplication process. Each and every time, the process stalls at sector 13,847,762 and the drive begins making a series of clicking noises.

The drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 160GB ST3160021A.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Does this sound like something a replacement circuit board might fix or is it probably a mechanical issue?

Can drive encryption cause faster drive failure?

For about the past two years I've used TrueCrypt to encrypt my entire hard drive. During this time I've had a complete hard drive failure (data unrecoverable, had to RMA the drive) twice. I've never really had a problem with this before. I was wondering if there is any chance that the increased hard disk activity associated with constant encrypting/decrypting might cause a hard drive to fail

External hard drive clicks - doesn't read

My external hard drive isn't being read. I can hear the head begin to spin, then click, and stop. The process repeats a couple of times. Then it stops spinning altogether.

I have given the drive to recovery experts who say they can't do anything. Any ideas before I toss it in the bin?

What is the fastest way to force hdd to reallocate bad sectors and discard the data?

I either own or am in charge of (at work) a lot of HDDs that are either part of raid arrays, or there are backups of the data elsewhere.

When a disk is starting to fail and going slow because it's repeatedly trying to recover data out of an area is very annoying. I don't need the data and I'd like to either fix or force some errors on the failing drives so that hdd manufacturers are more likely replace them under warranty.

I realise there are other QAs about bad sectors but they are typically talking about recovering data. I'm not interested in what data is on the drive. Essentially I'd like to rapidly force the SMART reallocated sector count up over the failure threshold as quickly as possible or have the disk stabilise with all bad sectors reallocated and no more occurring. Currently the steps I take are

1. quick format the drive
2. if there was any errors go to step 1
3. use a powershell script to copy files to fill the entire disk
4. if there were any errors delete the problem files and goto step 3
5. verify contents of all files are the same as the source file
6. if there were any errors go to step 1

Usually the disk stops working completely or I become fed up with how many days this takes before the reallocated sector count reaches its failure threshold.

Sometimes I try the technique of leaving a file in a special bad files folder I make that I know has a bad sector in the file as my own marker to not use those sectors.

Are there any other tools or methods that could be faster?

Edit: I should also point out that I'm not concerned about securely wiping the drive either. If someone physically obtains the disk and can read any data off it good for them.

How bad is my ssd disk?

Eventually I get very long boot times. Some times I have to re-install some programs because of segmentation fault. So I found my ssd disk, which is 12 months old, have some problems as seen in this picture:

How can I tell if it is about to break or if it has more time of life?

Anything I can do about erratic hard disk drive speeds

I don't seem to have very good luck with hard disk drives these days; 3 side-by-side (non-RAID) drives on my machine, replaced 5 drives in the last 4 years. My problem of the moment is that my largest drive (3000GB) seems to now be having some pretty serious read issues.

At best, accessing it comes up with erratic read/write speeds, but for the most part, I can’t even really access the data for anything meaningful and testing it seems to fail out after a bit. The SMART test on it lists two warnings under “Reallocated Sector Count” and “Current Pending Sector.”

The drive itself is a Seagate Barracuda bought in 2013. Installed at the same time was a SSD which seems to be functioning just fine (I run performance and health tests on it every once and a while as it is my primary drive). The machine is a custom build with 1000w power supply and Cooler Master case. The machine and drives stay relatively cool and have good ventilation.

Is there anything I can do to save my drive, or am I looking down the barrel of yet another hard disk drive replacement?

2TB Seagate External GoFlex external hard drive failure: Is there anything I can do?

I have a 2TB Seagate External GoFlex—which has a Seagate 2TB 9VT156-570 installed—that I’d like to recover the data from. It was working and I was going to make a backup. I bought a SATA docking station, and plugged in the drive, connecting it to my MacBook air.

Previously, the drive wouldn’t be recognized by my Mac because the external SATA base that the drive came with was somewhat defective. But it would mount just fine on my Windows PC. With the external SATA dock I was able to mount the drive on my Mac and check out the files. I tried copying a single small file from the Seagate, and the copy operation hung. I restarted my computer, and powered off the docking station.

After that, powering on the drive produced the repetitive beeping indicative of a spindle that is prevented from spinning (from what I researched on YouTube). I opened up the drive, expecting to have to retract the actuator arm to free the head from the spindle. The actuator arm was not fully retracted, but the head wasn’t over the platter either.

After closing the drive and connecting to power, the drive spins up and sounds normal. But, neither my Mac, Windows PC, or Linux machine detects the drive. I have verified that the SATA adapters works with other drives so I am not sure how to proceed.

As far as failures, I can only guess that either the controller board or the actuator arm motor isn’t working properly. I also can’t tell if the way in which the problem started, reading a file from a Mac is an insight or a red herring. I have Paragon NTFS and NTFS-3G installed on my Mac. I’d appreciate someone’s 2 cents.

How can I recover dead SSD drives?

I haven't lost any mission critical data or anything, but I have in my possession a large number of SSD 2.5" drives that were pulled for unreliability or being "dead". I am curious if there's any way to bring them back to life, but purely as an experiment and ignoring things like warranty and sending them to a professional.

This is almost certainly a big waste of time, but I thought I'd ask all the same.

The drives I have fall into two types: I have a stack of Kingston SSDNOW V100 drives that never got the important firmware update that is supposed to prevent data loss. I also have a stack of OCZ Vertex2 SSDs.

In both cases the drives are not recognized at all by the system. Not through an external enclosure, not by connecting the drive as primary SATA, and not by changing the BIOS to AHCI or IDE SATA mode.

That probably means that nothing can be done, but if I open the OCZ drives there is a connector featuring 4 holes labelled GND, TX, RX, and VCC. Is there any chance I can connect a ROM reader or something to this interface and possibly repair or gain more information about the drive?

Has anyone successfully attempted something like a reflow of the NAND chips, which I've seen mentioned online before?

Could there be any other avenue for refreshing these drives to the point where they are recognized somewhere?

I accept they're probably toast and worthless, but before I threw them away I was curious if there's any possible tinkering I could do.

Thanks for your time.

How do I fix a boot process that broke because of a failed hard drive? (Windows 7)

I used Windows XP for years, before I was able to get my hands on Windows 7 RC, which I bought a new HDD for, and setup to dual-boot. About a month ago, Windows XP started acting funny, and I thought the disk might be dying, so I started using Windows 7 all the time.

Today I started the computer, and it can't find the disk which Windows XP was installed on anymore. I guess it's dead. So, I removed the hard drive that had Windows on it, and now my computer won't start - I get an error message that says insert bootable disk (or something similar).

How do I remove the primary (dead) hard drive that has Windows XP installed on it and boot straight to Windows 7?

Is my hard disk failing?

I have a problem with my computer: I'm using Windows 7 x64, and when I try to acces the Downloads folder, it takes a long time. After waiting for half a minute or more, I can open it, see the contents, copy and move files, etc.

And now, when I open Firefox and I click on the new tab button, it also freezes for a couple of minutes.

Is the hard disk failing? I haven't tried formating the hard disk (lots of information inside), but chkdsk doesn't notice any problem... Should I buy another hard disk inmediatly and reinstall the OS?

Are SSD's really reliable enough for power users?

TL;DR (though please read my full experience before jumping in with a quick answer.)

A power user performs a certain amount of write cycles. Does an MLC SSD drive support enough write cycles to last a power user around 5 years of usage. In my first experience with an SSD, it became cranky after just nine months. Based on my usage patterns, is this normal for an SSD or was it just a dud?

About nine months ago I bought an SSD (a 60GB OCZ Vertex Turbo). Up until about two weeks ago, I really loved the drive. It was extremely reliable and it really did make my system much more responsive. But two weeks ago, the drive started failing. It took me about 1½ weeks just to pinpoint the exact problem, and in the last few days it just got progressively worse. The drive has been taken back to the shop.

During these last two weeks I've done considerable research on MLC based SSDs and to be frank, I have huge doubts about the technology. What I would like to know is whether my concerns are warranted, or did I just get a dud drive?

You can reply per point if you like:

1. Getting bad sectors on an SSD is just a matter of time, and bad sectors develop quick. It seems the software driver controller is responsible for keeping a log of these bad sectors and avoiding the use thereof.
2. Within 9 months of usage I developed enough bad sectors to make the controller really work to find sectors it could still use.
3. The controller isn't perfect, and once you've got a certain amount of bad sectors, you'll have an extremely unstable and insecure computing experience.
4. It’s not easy to pinpoint the exact cause of your system crashes.
5. I was using my SSD as a boot drive. I had vitals installed and other development tools, I also installed Sharepoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 Express. Besides this I had Visual Studio and Outlook. At no time did I copy huge movie or iso images or games to the SSD. Any non vital apps were kept on a regular hdd drive.
6. I completely did apply tweaks such as turning off system restore, and I NEVER defragged SSD.
7. I never turn my system off, unless I need to restart. Having said this, my system does enter standby mode when not in use.
8. I was running Windows 7 64bit with trim enabled.
9. I ran an anti-virus app.

Do you think if you're a demanding power user, you simply go through too many write cycles for an SSD to last more than around 9 months?

How to prevent programs (e.g. Process Monitor) from killing my SSD in 2 weeks?

I just got my first SSD - Intel 320 Series 120GB yesterday. And I have SSDLife monitoring in the background. I have TRIM enabled.

After I have installed all software, and did some basic testings. SSDLife said "Total Data written, GB" = 52.1 (40GB used space, 70GB free space).

In order to extend the lifespan of SSD, I moved Temp folders, Google Earth cache, Picasa db files to HDD. But I left the pagefile on SSD, because I have only 4GB RAM, I need SSD to speed up IO to the pagefile.

In this post, the poster mentioned using Process Monitor to monitor writes to SSD. So I tried the latest version of Process Monitor myself.

I accidentally found, after I started Process Monitor, in SSDLife the "Data written, GB" value was increasing at the rate of about 10MB/s. Once I closed Process Monitor, everything back to normal.

That means, if I keep Process Monitor running in the background for 24 hours (I know I don't have the need to do that, but that could happen if I forgot to close it.), it will decrease the lifespan of my SSD by 850GB.

According to the "Write Endurance Specifications" of Intel's document:

Intel 320 Series 120GB - 100% random 4k writes = 15TB

1. Is that mean if I keep Process Monitor (or similar programs) running in the background, it could kill my SSD in just 2 weeks? How about if I accidentally have 2 or 3 of them running in the background? My SSD could die in just one week or even a few days?

2. How do I know if a program has aforementioned behavior without manually testing it? Any software could monitor in the background and give warning when it discovered this kind of behavior?

Thanks

Update:

Just found the Pro version of SSDLife has a feature SmartCheck:

check SSD health status on schedule (each 4 hours) on program startup and exit if no changes in health, shows message only if health changes

I think this should somehow detect aforementioned behavior and give warnings.

Mean Time to Failure (MTTF): When disk manufacturers post this, how should you interpret their numbers?

Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) is usually given in terms of hours, and by doing some calculations, it seems that a disk should fail only after a good number of years have gone by.

It seems that disks need repair more often than that. Does anyone know why this is so?

I figured that there is something fishy about this metric. Am interpreting something wrong here?

My harddrive failed SMART check and short drive self test. What should I do?

I used SeaTools for Windows to test my harddrive and i failed the S.M.A.R.T check and Short Drive Self Test.

1. What's wrong with my hard drive?

2. Is it a big problem? Do I need to do anything to solve the problem?

3. (if I save a file and open it and it wasn't as i have saved it earlier, i would consider that a very big problem indeed)