Your Hard Drive Could be DYING. Here's How to Check!

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Your storage device WILL eventually fail. But what if you knew the signs to look for ahead of time so you could react appropriately and save your data?
Beat It on FLOPPOTRON by Paweł Zadrożniak:
• Beat It on FLOPPOTRON
Sounds of a Failed Hard Drive by MausolfB: • Sounds of a Failed Har...
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MUSIC CREDIT
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Intro: Laszlo - Supernova
Video Link: • [Electro] - Laszlo - S...
iTunes Download Link: itunes.apple.com/us/album/sup...
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Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High
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Intro animation by MBarek Abdelwassaa / mbarek_abdel
Monitor And Keyboard by vadimmihalkevich / CC BY 4.0 geni.us/PgGWp
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CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro
0:43 Sound
2:23 SMART
3:33 Software
5:45 Used HDDs
7:26 Backups
7:46 Too late
9:45 Outro

[@justalpha2396]

I remember having my harddrive die on me when I was maybe like 15. It was like 3 am and I was working on some of my music when it happened and I thought I lost everything and just started crying. I had years of writing, pictures and so much more on that drive and when it failed it made my heart break. Luckily the data was salvageable but ever since that incident I have been super careful with backups and cloud storage on all of my devices. Never wanna go through something like that again.

[@zeroturn7091]

I should call her.

[@Dimondminer11]

I'm glad at the very least that all my pictures and most of my important data has been backed up to the cloud and locally is on SSDs now. I still have a single, used, 500GB HDD in my machine that is more just for random videos I've made or other not really needed files.

[@sagichnichtsowiesonicht7326]

my internet is too bad for cloud storage lol, germany is assbackwards when it comes to internet.

[@PrisonYT]

@D never read better words in my life lol. Aussie internet is 100000% worse than almost any country out there. Even the average school network connection per user is like 2mbps, in the US that would be at least 20. Australians have it harder than alot of people when it comes to internet.

[@BenitoiteBaTiSi]

i'm used to lost TeraBytes of data, poor internet speed for cloud storage backup **sigh*

[@kristian80au]

I find it a shame that these days many channels use video titles that aren't at all descriptive of what the video is about. I typically don't bother clicking. This video's topic is especially interesting and I'm lucky I clicked on it.

[@khaledm.1476]

That's for the algorithm and click bait reasons. On floatplane the LTT video names are completely dry and descriptive

[@wadud92]

LTT at least have some kind of identifier in the thumbnail. Jayz2cents on the other hand..

[@kavinshanbhag3417]

They usually change it in like a week for a more useful title

[@kristian80au]

Yes, I know it's for the algorithm. I usually make it a point not to click videos like this. My actions are only a drop in the bucket, but if everyone followed suit we could change the algorithm/tactic. Regarding the comment about Jay - I agree, he's become worse and I stopped watching his videos. I try and support creators that don't bow to poor tactics such as Gamers Nexus and L1.

[@modosn]

“Failure is not an option” and the thumbnail is Anthony with a hard drive… I’m going to assume this video is about hard drive failure.

[@sourceeee]

I just now discovered that one of my 1TB HDDs has been in the process of failing for 2 months after seeing several critical errors in Event Viewer, I am now in the process of migrating my data to another drive. I avoided an absolute catastrophe thanks to this video. Absolute W

[@arrowghost]

I love it when you mention the Floppotron, this is where old HDD & FDD go to their 2nd life as a musical instrument.

[@Felipemelazzi]

Floppotron is beautiful =)

[@preferredimage]

A good tip to hearing a drive even in a case with fans going. is a non-magnetic screwdriver. rest the tip of the driver (bigger the better) on the drive surface gently and put the handle in your ear... the sound travels up the driver and you can hear it. even in a server with multiple drives. Do not impale yourself!

[@WarrenGarabrandt]

Instructions unclear. Perforated my ear ball.

[@billlucas8124]

classic technique used by mechanics too. helps you zero in on clicking noises when an engine is making all sorts of racket everywhere else.

[@joeyyung911]

You should specify non-magnetic screwdriver.

[@nathanlowery1141]

@@Dylan-zm3ht tried and true method. Also throwing it against the wall really hard to see if it falls apart helps

[@PvtAnonymous]

@@nathanlowery1141 drilling holes into it helps you take a peek inside!

[@StompySan]

My best tale for data recovery comes from my early teens. I was 1. Dumb, 2. Not financially stable, and 3. DUMB. I was able to totally recover all of my data from an old 60GB drive with a combination of a week of time, a freezer, and lots of attempts with ddrescue. I was ultimately able to get a bit-accurate image, and restored it to another junky drive from a recycling pull... That promptly died as well. And what was I trying to save? Some old game repacks that took a long time to download over dialup. Just had to save that copy of UT2K4. The good ol' days.

[@taronzgaming7739]

UT2k4 is worth saving brother. A good save.

[@Phantogram2]

I saved UT2K4 when formatting HDD even tho I had it on my disc. That game is worth saving on multiple backups.

[@Felipemelazzi]

Woah! DDRescue is older than I expected

[@sburton015]

For its age, the original hard drive in my oldest laptop still works fine with no bad sectors. Its a Toshiba Satellite 330 CDS from 1998 with its original 4 gb hard drive. Not bad that it still works fine even after almost 24 years since it was made and I have it running Windows 98 second edition.

[@Schule04]

Make sure to remove the backup batteries from under the keyboard. When they leak they can destroy the mainboard.

[@HazewinDog]

how much on-time? that is the main contributor to hard drive aging

[@𝐹𝓇𝑒𝒶𝓀𝓎Ch3rry]

What does bad sectors mean?

[@sburton015]

@@𝐹𝓇𝑒𝒶𝓀𝓎Ch3rry it means an area of a hard disk platter that is damaged physically, either by contaminants getting into the drive of the head scratching the platter due to the hard disk being handled too rough.

[@ZERARCHIVE2023]

Mine, 1to from 2013, I got with my first dead HP laptop, that I putted on my PS3, died a long time ago

[@mikhayahu]

Many years ago I had two 80gig hard drives in raid 0 for OS, apps, and a lot of personal files. One of them started squeaking, but I ignored it. Then one day it made a sound like a shovel being dragged across concrete and died. Nothing was recoverable, and I learned some valuable lessons.

[@DarkSideKyp]

“Failure is always an option!” -Adam Savage

[@superuser3026]

YES!

[@nickkk420]

"keep it in the family" - Adam savage

[@DarkSideKyp]

@@nickkk420 That’s what they call “puppy love from the same litter.”

[@IngeniebrioCivil]

Now i need that crossover "LTT build a NAS for Adam Savage"

[@ethans4783]

@@IngeniebrioCivil LTT x Tested? I think getting Adam and Alex talking, and maybe Norm with Linus, would be so cool!!

[@carl.will.larson]

This is a great video! I hope LTT does more like this, signs of SSD failure, fan failure, etc...

[@chadbizeau5997]

That may be one of the lab functions

[@tspooner01]

Fan failure is pretty easy to figure out

[@PaintsAreOp]

161 000 views in the first 2 hours is catastrophic for a channel this large, so they probably won't.

[@Clavichordist]

@@tspooner01 Yes and no. The newer systems have fans that don't spin all the time or will spin slowly. This is also a sign that the fans are failing. I did have one fail though and I was able to tell because that particular fan never came on even when the others were screaming along at the highest RPM. Poking the fan with a small plastic stirrer resulted in the fan spinning up, which means the motor or bearings are failing. If the fan makes noise though, that's a bit different.

[@Masterrunescapeer]

SSD failure is usually gradual unless the controller just gives up in one go, where you can't tell that will happen outside of knowing that the product line is faulty. Otherwise things like flash exhaustion the SSD will report, and Windows will notify the user that there is an issue (Windows checks SMART stats).

[@kuhrd]

Out of literally thousands of drive failures I have seen over the years, I have only ever seen S.M.A.R.T detect a problem on 2 drives that I didn't already know were failing. I have also had drives that S.M.A.R.T condemned very early on in life last for 5-6 additional years without any issue so I don't really trust S.M.A.R.T data for anything other than a quick gauge to see what the drive has been through and potential physical issues it may already be suffering from.

[@CesarinPillinGaming]

Agree, HDDs have the tendency of sometimes just.. fail spontaneously. Aaah the good ol' clicking noise.

[@Felipemelazzi]

Read Error Scans are our best friends. It takes time, but it's much more reliable, in my experience

[@CesarinPillinGaming]

@Rhyean Drive SSD health is based on how many writes you have done. If you're writing, erasing, etc.. is going to reduce it quickly. On the good side compared to HDDS.. HDDS can die instantly with no way to recover from one day to another (clicking problem). While SSDs usually degrade until they are do not allow you to write anymore, but your data can be still recovered.

[@HazewinDog]

You must be much better than the average techie at identifying issues then. I also have had SMART detect two failing drives (that later would fail), but in my case I've only had 4 of my drives fail in my life, and the first two were before I knew anything about computers. (a couple weeks old Samsung 1.5TB and an aging Maxtor 120GB) As for drives it detected that would later die, I only remember the story of one of them. I picked up two Seagate 500GB drives I saw laying on the concrete next to a dumpster. Both of them had reallocated sectors but were virtually unused. One of them got worse quickly and ended up dying, the other kept working until I no longer needed it. I think they were old spares from a company that they literally tossed out (looked clean & near-pristine)

[@Jaswahhihi]

Hey, just wanted to say thanks for this video. I am old enough that I should definitely know better. Your vid prompted me to check my only remaining HDD status. Got 'Pred Fail' and found loads of bad block errors. Replaced with a 1TB SDD. Thank you Anthony!

[@light-master]

Last year, bought a brand new HDD from Best Buy. Put it into my NAS and ran an extended SMART test before doing anything else... 1000s of bad sectors right off the bat. Return and replaced, and new one is still working great today.

[@gblargg]

The hour+ long extended SMART test is great to run on any drive of unknown condition, new or used. It's like running a few hours of Memtest86(+) on new RAM before you trust it.

[@JSTheAnonymousOne]

Usually what I do with new drives is run a single pass wipe and then an extended SMART test. The wipe ensures that all sectors have been written to and SMART may have something to actually read. You still need to monitor the drive for about a month, but it does help a fair amount.

[@I_killed_that_beard_guy]

My samsung 870 evo showing failing LBA error what does it mean? But it's running fine

[@FAB1150]

My laptop's hard drive was a tank, it survived ten years in backpacks, luggage, being thrown around in checked luggage by airport staff, me shaking the laptop, being dropped tens of times while running, from heights spanning from 1ft to the top of a 6ft ladder (the display broke lol). I only replaced it because after all that, it only could push 20MB/s read and it was _slightly_ painful to wait that long for everything

[@pyrioncelendil]

The usual first sign of a magnetic drive on its way out due to substrate failure is when Windows throws a delayed write failed error. You might also get loads of errors in the SMART error log. That's the point where you should already have made backups, and if not, get the most critical shit copied off ASAP because the drive isn't likely to survive the day. I've had several hard drives go out this way, and the fun part is that the failures are predictable months in advance if you do sequential read tests of the whole drive and you have sections where the read speed drops through the floor, as those are areas where the substrate is already failing, but hasn't quite gone completely dead yet.

[@mosheep]

Ohmygod I needed this. My PC is always notifying me to "scan for drive errors" every start up. I'm also experiencing stuttering whenever I play videos that are on the hard drive but not one's on the ssd. I'm going to check out the softwares mentioned here. Thanks LTT!

[@jasonbalicki7948]

I've had pretty good luck with high capacity refurbished enterprise drives for my home NAS. As long as you buy from a reputable vendor (read: not ebay) they'll have some sort of warranty and easy(ish) return policy.

[@thiefrules]

what are some reputable vendors?

[@BNOVA]

Please list some resellers 😁

[@KurruptedDataYouT]

Nothing wrong with eBay, just have to double check it comes with a warranty from the company and it's a reputable seller and not 60 year old Jim from IT selling random drives out his closet.

[@WarrenGarabrandt]

@@thiefrules I like Server Supply for used drives, but if you are wanting to roll the dice, Amazon and Newegg Marketplace often have used drives for sale. Just make sure you get some kind of warranty, erase the entire drive as step one (to protect yourself), and then run a full smart diagnostic (to check or bad sectors), follow by benchmarks (to make sure the drive isn't crap performance like a dying drive often is). Return any drive with bad, reallocated, or unstable sectors.

[@ric_dk-9520]

@@thiefrules all my refurbished drives came with fresh 3-5 years warranty from Western Digital... ..

[@HEXSIDE]

Actually had a drive issue very recently. Turned out my harddrive was getting oddly warm and caused it to crash everytime i was gaming off of it. Cleaned my pc, upgraded cooling, no more crashing, no event viewer logs

[@phuzz00]

Getting too hot can cause long-term damage to a harddrive as well (I've killed a couple like this), so I'd recommend making sure everything is backed up right now, and replace the drive when you can.

[@ayrtontv6025]

The production quality is actually mind blowing. Especially when you consider how much content they release daily

[@WillCarterTech]

Kinda crazy they filmed this in the work shop and the audio sounds like a sound stage. Looks and sounds fantastic!

[@pickelsvonbrine]

I am a former data recovery engineer and data recovery can be both difficult and expensive. Worst single hard recovery required a new pcb, firmware repair (took me a month to find matching firmware to get modules), 5 separate head exchanges and had heavily degraded surface. Even more so are the number of drives that suffered platter damage… platter damage isn’t recoverable folks. Your data is scrapped from the surface and becomes dust in the filter. So many people I have worked with in computer repair think their computer or external being slow is because it is old… or they just keep data on an external with no backup.

[@jonnyspeed8974]

do you mean scraped?

[@AlexanderEngler]

We have a dead external hard drive where the controller messed up the data. I've told my dad to create an image from the drive and then use recovery software. Do you have a recommendation for a software to try? The drive itself is readable, but a Linux system is not finding interpretable data on the partitions.

[@gblargg]

@@AlexanderEngler testdisk will search for partitions and optionally update the partition table.

[@me0262]

As someone who's been in computer repair and sent drives out for recovery quotes, how recoverable are head crashing drives? I always quoted customers the cleanroom recovery for those.

[@pickelsvonbrine]

@@jonnyspeed8974 head comes into contact with the platter and physically removed your data by ripping the surface up. Scraping it off the surface. Instead of a shiny disk it has lines in it or worse looks heavy abraded.

[@_GhostMiner]

After experiencing an almost a hard drive failure myself, i learn quite a lot from pushing it beyond the limits. I pushed it so hard the reallocated sectors count froze on 9 800 and hasn't changed since.

[@shre6619]

Same thing, those 1tb hdd had been squeezed ti the last drop of blood before they are dead

[@msh6610]

Yea, after allocating bad blocks the hdd's can still work fine for years. SDD's just die :S (In my experience..)

[@dh2032]

@@msh6610 that's the big I don't like about SDD's, they just don't seem safe place for you data, If when I do get one, have a back up copy of SDD's on a regular spinning rust in size alone, a too three time the size to the price of SDD's

[@garystinten9339]

A piece of circuitry to monitor sectors on an SSD to block dead sectors should be created to shut them off so we can eventually run to 1 sector

[@LazyEngineerYT]

@Telleva why do parents should buy you new one? Get a job and buy it yourself, and don't say that a kid can't get job until he has degree in first place why does a 12 yr old kid needs multiple hdd? This is not your parents duty to buy.

[@coulomjo]

Another great video hosted by Anthony! Also I love the blue backlight in the shop, it completely changes the atmosphere!

[@no00ob]

I've always found it odd that none of the drives I've used have ever failed. I still use an external drive my dad bought like almost 15 years ago for himself and it still works and only had 3 bad sectors last time I checked.

[@LangleyNA]

All my IDE drives from the 1980s and 1990s eventually croaked by the end of the 2000s. My 2000s drives all died, too. But everything I've had since the 2010s has been surviving. My oldest working drives now began use in 2012. In my machine I use most, I've got two drives from 2018 that seem to be working... although, since June, the 2018 mechanical has been making a clockbeat rhythm and I'm unsure why. I'll load it up in BIOS soon and see if it's doing it there, too. I can easily sustain the loss, and it's a smaller capacity single terrabyte drive. If it's making the sounds in BIOS after I reseat the drives in the drive bay, and all the cables, then I suppose that's fine. I was intending to replace the drive anyway in the near future. I think you're right, Aki. My experience with modern junk is that it's great, at least compared to the old IDE drives. LOL Those things are dinosaur tech.

[@zinsy23]

I have a drive from 2006 that still appears to be working as of less than a year ago. I haven't used it recently, but I wouldn't be surprised if it still works. I've been fortunate so far as well and have never seen a hard drive fail either. Believe it or not, I've had RAM fail on me before. Very weird odds of what I've seen if you ask me.

[@dragon2knight]

I have had more than my fair share of hard drives go bye bye....but they do usually give you plenty of warning before going boom. Anthony does his usual great job of explaining this of course, and we are all saved now!

[@getridofit3]

There's plenty of warning and then there's Seagate's ST3000DM001!

[@dragon2knight]

@@getridofit3 AHHHHHH SEAGATE!!! Run away! Run Away!!

[@esenel92]

​@@getridofit3 Not just the seagate 3TB drives though, they were the worst but in general the whole 3 TB generation seemed cursed, I kinda skipped it and am still at (mostly seagate) 2TB and 4 TB drives atm and those have been rock solid for me. some of the 2 TB ones are over 10 yrs old now I think and still doing fine.

[@joncarter3761]

I used to work for a PC warranty place (early-to-mid 2000s) and in our engineers handbook we literally had 'lift the PC 2 inches off the ground and drop' as the official solution to resolve a stuck hard drive (when the head keeps clicking rather than reading/parking). I remember thinking it was a bit odd but when one of my hard drives got stuck I did it and it worked (took two drops though). Of course I ordered a new hard drive and transferred the data because I knew I'd have caused some surface damage to the platters but I couldn't have got my data (without one of those super expensive data recovery companies) without that maneuverer and would have lost everything. Sometimes mechanical issues require mechanical solutions, not saying it works every time but it's def worth a go before spending money on a data recovery service.

[@SiverJohn]

My mother worked in IT and this was a legit solution at her work. (It was the easier version of opening the computer taking the hard drive out and slinging it, which was the earlier fix.)

[@Twisterhere]

NO it's definitely not worth a go! You could cause irreversible data loss, when it's otherwise intact. If you have valuable data, never risk it.

[@foodhatesme]

I'd assume it works due to the stepper motor getting stuck, and the shock of the fall allowing it to move again.

[@foodhatesme]

@@Twisterhere what good is the data if it's stored on a paper weight? And if the data was so "valuable" you wouldn't even consider this anyways.

[@Twisterhere]

@@foodhatesme You're calling a hard drives paper weights? And no it's not caused by a stepper motor, stuck heads are caused by numerous things such as dirt/lube build up, shock damage, failed pre-amps.

[@steve9094]

My WD Green 4tb drive is a remnant from the first PC I built in 2014, and it's still working without errors as my main data drive for Windows. I've always left my PCs constantly running, with the option to turn off the hard drives during inactivity disabled, and it seems to be working for me so far. Yeah though, even though the SMART data is all fine (except for Load/Unload Cycle Count and Power on Hours), I'm planning to replace it sometime this year. I would've already done that if my data wasn't already backed up on an external HDD.

[@HazewinDog]

I read sometime that most HDDs either die within the first 2 years (manufacturing issue) or after the first 9 years (age)

[@WigWoo1]

So I know they say NOT to open a drive in a standard room because there's dust and particles in the air that can destroy it, but what about opening a drive outside? Since there's no dust outside would it make sense to open a hard drive on a table or something outside in an open field?

[@extectic]

Outdoor air is absolutely full of pollutants. The amount of dust, pollen and god knows what else is in outdoor air in a field has to be astronomical. Clean room standards are incredibly exacting,. So no, you can't open a drive and expect to get it back if you do it in a field. In fact, if you open a drive at all even in a clean room you need pros to get the data off the platters.

[@jack-o-wack-o3666]

I went to the store and bought a 4tb NAS. Suprisingly the NAS itself was cheaper then the drive on amazon. I pulled the drive from it and have been using it for about 2 years with no issues whatsoever.

[@SpyderBlackOfficial]

Same here

[@rudysal1429]

You mean an external hard drive?

[@jack-o-wack-o3666]

@@rudysal1429 The product listing says its a NAS so no

[@alexisrivera200xable]

Fun video, Having experienced plenty of hardware failures on all kinds of storage due to work and my own personal storage at home, I'm probably never beyond 200 feet of a failing or failed hard drive. I say this because the video came up and I was just looking at a box with 5 untested hard drives. Certainly helped pass the time while I check them before backing up anything salvageable off them.

[@DrivenKeys]

Thanks LTT, this helps me decide what to do with a small stack of lightly used, old drives.

[@MLGaeming]

Backups are the only way to be safe and they are incredibly important, everything else is just a nice to have.

[@nicka5040]

Can we get a dedicated Anthony show already? Straight to the point, simple enough to understand, and charismatic.

[@MntRprznt]

Also cute AF.

[@voltage5802]

@@MntRprznt wtf

[@skilletborne]

@@voltage5802 Bit rude to their tastes and Anthony too It takes literally less time to simply not be a jerk.

[@Elise-3939]

@@skilletborne bit rude to diminish someone to how cute they are unsolicited

[@samuelmueller2769]

Might be a bit of a pointless designation. We already have an Anthony show, its just that it happens to be on the LTT channel.

[@pacershark452]

LTT: "Failure is NOT an option!" HARD DRIVE:"Of course it's not, you never HAD one to begin with."😐

[@mk810]

It’s an inevitability

[@vamwolf]

@@mk810 yes Linus touch of death

[@pacershark452]

@@vamwolf 😂

[@pacershark452]

😎

[@tsirakura1684]

thanks for the video. I was worried about my hardrive since it started grumbling at me while writing and retrieving data, but now I don't need to worry about it.

[@esrevinu.]

very informative, and I learned about some other options/programs outside of my own normal "go to" ones!

[@Kenny_J]

This is the type of video I genuinely enjoy! informative, not over the top and clear

[@tobiwonkanogy2975]

S.M.A.R.T. tracking is the only tracking i support with no questions. It can tell you how many hours the drive has been powered on and each time it has been turned to park or stopped as well as what Anthony mentioned.

[@pyrioncelendil]

You can also initiate SMART self-tests with smartmontools that are both OS-independent and log the results to the drive's internal SMART self-test log. Whenever I get a new magnetic drive, first thing I do is a selective test across the whole surface (smartctl -t select,0-max) so that if a new drive arrives with any bad sectors, it goes straight back to the vendor for replacement, and the drive is basically blighted at that point because the self-test results are baked into the drive's self-test log.

[@dirg3music]

I recently ordered a 4tb Exos drive that was advertised as brand new, after opening it, i immediately knew that it was pre-owned so I fired up CrystalDiskInfo and lo and behold, it had been powered on for 36000 hours and only powered on 24 times. Thankfully, the seller was willing to give a refund so it all worked out. Thank god for SMART.

[@FlyboyHelosim]

@@dirg3music I've had some drives where the CrystalDiskInfo stats just don't make sense. Such as those numbers you describe. What situation would a drive only be booted some two dozen times for over 30k hours?

[@RobinCernyMitSuffix]

@@FlyboyHelosim Servers. I have a few dozen drives running that have over 55'000h of run time, and where only powered on 3-4 times. (mind you, Seagate Exos drives are enterprise drives)

[@FlyboyHelosim]

@@RobinCernyMitSuffix Yeah, sure. Except I don't have any server hard drives. The scenario I talked about applies to consumer-grade hard drives taken out of laptops. I've also noticed erroneous numbers linked to hard drives taken out of things like Sky TV boxes.

[@Aepek]

0:21 Well now Anthony; the answer to the query you asked is: Yessiree bobskee I know how to tell, or check, if my HDD about (or gonna) kick that big bucket down the road. It’s simple, take it out and shake it as fast and hard as you can. If after 1-5 mins (depending on how tired arm gets) nothing comes out or rattles inside making noises. You are in the clear & shouldn’t fear that your HDD is about to be unalive on you; which would just be a bad bad bad terrible thing to have happen; especially if ya didn’t practice safe HDD practices and have at least 2 backups, but 3 would be better😉

[@wintorialslift]

I remember when my old PC tower started having issues with random lockups for no real reason (sometimes with those lines on the screen going across). The 7 year old 250GB HDD was what I found to be the issue (since anything big loading off the drive is what caused the freezing), and replaced it with a 500GB HDD one. Worked for another few years before having issues with other components and eventually it just went unused.

[@spagamoto]

Hah, back in high school (almost 20 years ago...) my dad's work laptop died due to a seized drive... opened that sucker up in the cleanest area of the house, poked the spindle, sealed it back up, and used that drive and laptop as a server for four years. I only retired it because I wanted a more powerful machine. Sometimes these machines can surprise you.

[@Mattdro88]

You got lucky. Next time use a laminar flow hood. Any dust can murder a drive and there are millions if not billions of dust particles in a clean home.

[@web1bastler]

Had a few failures over my years. Most were insignificant. Only one was slightly significant as it was a failure of one of my servers HDD's. Thanks to the combo of zfs and zed I got an email about the failure while I was sitting in school (this is several years back now) so I was able to just pick up a replacement drive on my walk back home and swap it in.

[@TurtleSauceGaming]

As someone who's expanding a plex server and is thinking about going WD gold (i was outgrowing my space quickly before, and needed a drive, so went external, and going to use those for cold backup. Mind you, I'm running 51tb on my server, a 1tb ssd and 50tb of HDDs for plex). But I'd love to see an in depth talk about different "trim levels" of hard drives, across both WD and Seagate, especially covering how Gold might or might not be worth the money.

[@the7observer]

Hard Disk Sentinel is a program that I use. Once you start using it will start recording the "health" in percentage (estimate of life left) for SSD and HDD as well as let you see S.M.A.R.T and gives a estimated lifetime writes

[@davidgreen4406]

What a coincidence! I was already running a SMART test of my hard drives 15 minutes before I saw this video ---btw DriveDX is a very good software option for Mac users

[@DancingSweater]

samee

[@adamhooper2476]

Victoria HDD/SSD is the tool of choice for me. It's free and has a lot more information and indications of a bad drive. You can even find out if the sectors are weak (but not dead yet).

[@iz723]

Sweet. Nice find

[@CotyRiddle]

Victoria is good (works really good on old win 9x systems)

[@LazyJesse]

Can I get it without going to shady third party websites (Softonic for example) or a Russian website?

[@vgamesx1]

@@LazyJesse Well, somebody put it on Chocolatey, so why not use that?

[@SomeThingOrMaybeAnother]

@@CotyRiddle It got new updates in the last couple of years and now it also works much better on more modern operating system.

[@Batyalas]

You never adressed what to do with a broken HDD. Do I just throw it away in the bin?

[@jfwfreo]

This video came at the right time to remind me to A.Finish cleaning up (and moving data off) the old HDD I have (I bought more SSD and now I don't need this old HDD anymore, especially since its probably more than 10 years old) and B.Once that's done, do a full backup.

[@simonro9168]

I got two decommissioned servers, each with 4/8 bays filled with 1TB drives, and obviously the pc hardware, raid cards and PSUs. Worth way more than the fifty bucks I paid. I have the drives in RAID with one redundant drive, and important data is backed up daily to my NAS (also used drives). The NAS data is backed up onto the RAID array. So if either one fails, I can simply buy a proper 8TB drive new and restore from backup, without much fuss. Yes, used drives are a gamble, but it's not too bad if you're smart about it.

[@erikstillman3553]

20+ years ago I had my hd kick the bucket... while tripping on 'shrooms. All was great with the world, pc crashed, hd was screaming inside the case, and it turned into my WORST trip EVER. So bad that I've never took hallucinogens after that. So I guess good things can happen when your hd crashes.

[@PORRFNK]

Induced K-hole HDD panic !!!

[@gregdaweson4657]

Give us a trip report

[@jayman4566]

It is always interesting seeing videos like this. I have probably had a couple thousnd hard drives go through my hands...and the failure rate especially on the last 10 years is far more on SSD drives goijg bad to mechanical. I think I have seen 40 SSDs fail to 30 mechanical drives.

[@silencer51]

As an IT guy, having experienced firsthand how unreliable spinning rust is, my instinct when someone asks me this question is to always reply with, 'yes, yes it probably is.' You can never trust hard drives, especially consumer level stuff (laptops/external drives etc).

[@n646n]

I have hard drives from the 90s that still work completely fine even after heavy tests. I don't get it.

[@FlyboyHelosim]

Well, also as an 'IT guy', I still put my trust in hard drives more than any other form of storage medium.

[@HazewinDog]

yeah they just die and die and die. SSDs have proven soo much more reliable for me. 50% of the hard disks my family and I have used have died, yet only two SSDs have died so far. One being a 2011 OCZ SSD that became well-known for being unreliable, and the other the cheapest SSD I ever bought, which died in the first 2 weeks. I personally use my SSDs very heavily and like to run them in RAID0 (I know..)

[@n646n]

@@HazewinDog wtf kind of hdds are you buying? Are you throwing them around? I've never had an HDD die on me in decades of working with them.

[@Shiroi0moi]

@@n646n Same. Never experienced a hard drive failure within 20 years of using computers. Many second hand purchases. Cheap flash drives on the other hand

[@DarkCid7777]

I have a routine for HDD. Brand new or used when received : check the smart and do a complete surface test with HDtune or HDSentinel to see if there are any errors If errors are found : return to amazon If ok : enjoy but always monitor and remember avoiding drop, vibrations and use a UPS

[@juliettaylorswift]

my amazon drives always go into my unraid server, and always 3 passes of preclear. If the packaging was...questionable...then 4 or 5 passes. I think i've actually only had to return 1 drive so far.

[@blenderbachcgi]

Hard Disk Sentinel says that my drive is nearly dead. It's at 9% Health. So many problems. And yet, when I decided to go and see files that are stored on those "dead sectors", the files are there and that sector still works. The 'wmic" test, says the drive is "OK"... So I don't know anymore...

[@p_x_]

@@juliettaylorswift How many passes did it take to decide to return that one drive?

[@juliettaylorswift]

@@p_x_ iirc before first pass finished. That was also back when the biggest exos was 14tb (but 12tb were still cheaper per tb)...so a while ago

[@forrandomsites3336]

"...vibrations..." Im surprised my 10 year old Xbox 360's hard drive hasn't died yet considering a lot of disc based games cause the whole console to vibrate A LOT.

[@PWN_Nation]

Compared to original IDE drives (the old school 20, 40, and 80 mb ones - if you were rich)...today's drives seem to be a much more dependable option. Not sure if their MTBF data show any actual projected increase in lifespan, but anecdotally? Yeah. they're better for sure.

[@AURPNOOBIE]

Me: **turned on the pc** My HDD: **Spin** **Few Seconds later** My HDD: **Click** Me: yep... thats a Hard Drive Failure

[@pgplaysvidya]

what's weird is that i've never seen a smart warning in my life but my brother has. multiple times. usually for me i'll break my drive (by dropping it or something) before it fails due to smart errors. no idea why drives go from good to warning in that case - just time? overusage?

[@pilotkaboom2974]

Anthony: The hero we never knew we needed, dont deserve, but is always there to save out butts from certain doom. Thank you.

[@SaraMorgan-ym6ue]

did your hard drive die?🤣

[@rossharper1983]

New 22tb drives were released yesterday, can't wait to order 6 of them and give my server more storage. I've got drives that have 11 years worth of power on time and still going strong....and others that die after less than 2 years

[@billybobby7607]

Why not buy 10mb full height 5.25" drives plenty of storage

[@rossharper1983]

@@billybobby7607 it's to difficult to find them in new nowadays and shipping on those second hand is costly

[@billybobby7607]

@@rossharper1983 hahaha whoosh

[@IamLegendAnon]

Why new drives that haven’t been tested in the field yet? Certain batches/models of drives are more prone to failure, so i typically wait for backblaze to have a significant sample size first, which usually takes a few years. My next drives will probably be a few of the Toshiba 16tb.

[@klaxoncow]

@@billybobby7607 We need a new meme for when someone does an "r/whoosh" on an "r/whoosh".

[@cleanycloth]

I bought two used 3TB WD Datacentre hard drives a while ago. They were super loud but pretty quick and cheap at £55 a drive (this was in 2018). One developed 8 bad and 8 weak sectors at one point but never increased. I stopped using them but I keep them around just in case.

[@akselhansen304]

Awesome video would be really cool to see more troubleshooting tips for commonish issues "is you're pc randomly crashing? Here is 10 ways to troubleshoot" I'll be expecting the SSD sequel shortly 👌

[@Fortzon]

What a coincidence that this video shows up couple days after I noticed that my oldest (7 years) SSD has been throwing up Event ID 7 (bad block) messages on Event Viewer for months. Weirdly it's failing sooner than my 11-year-old HDD. Hopefully you'll make that SSD version of this video soon 😅

[@Grocel512]

Samsung SDD from early 2021? RMA it, these are known factory defects on models from January to April 2021. You will get a new one that doesn't age prematurely.

[@Fortzon]

@@Grocel512 SSD in question is Samsung 850 Evo from 2015 so no RMA but I have to keep your comment in mind and check my Samsung 970s which I bought in 2021, they might be from that batch even though they still work perfectly.

[@Grocel512]

@@Fortzon You should be fine then. The nvme products were not affected. If you had a SATA 870 EVO 2TB or 4TB you would have to watch out for ECC error rate and unrecoverable error rates. I had an affected unit (4TB) that I RMA'ed.

[@Petar120]

10min video with 2 mins of self promotions/sponsors/unrelated content, you make 5 of these a week each containing 20% ads and you get a full video of nothing but ads, remember guys we allowed this to be a standard

[@17pdietcoke59]

Ok?

[@SevenGC89]

I know right! They shouldn't be able to make money with sponsors, they should be making all this amazing content for free, they're so rude trying to make money in order to keep making amazing content for us, they're so selfish.

[@17pdietcoke59]

Also note that this video had me skip the ad with one 5 seconds skip so calm down bud

[@eletro_doc9529]

Booted up my Quantum Fireball 20Gb from 1999 a few days ago. Still works like a charm, no harsh noises either. Perhaps newer drives are more prone to fail.

[@JFed-9]

I loved the “woop” in the command prompt 😂 Really captures the excitement of typing into a black terminal alone in your room.

[@testpleaseignore]

I am screenshotting 0:12 and making it my desktop background

[@ScottIsMyName]

Yes it is. Failure is always an option.

[@Shadow__133]

Failure is my only option.

[@RiadRiad]

I wanna fail :(

[@elijahdiaz5914]

I AM failure, so my options are limited

[@Shadow__133]

@@elijahdiaz5914 Already wrote that, so you failed 😝

[@trentonbennettVO]

Thanks! This was great info and well put together. :)

[@kztech1319]

In terms of laptop hard drives there is a greater number of factors involving how much they age. Of course how many shocks you incur to a laptop matters a lot vs sitting on a desk, but the shock mounting hardware inside the laptop for handling hard drives matter too. Business class laptops generally give much better padding around the hard drive as well as active drive protection, and for 10+ year old hard drives I find much more of them on business class laptops with zero bad sectors than those on an HP Pavilion or Dell Inspiron. I have many many 12+ years old Dell Latitude laptops with their original hard drives still 100% error free for example.

[@SageBladeG]

RIP Anthony

[@creounity]

Last winter the NVME M.2 SSD on my laptop died for no reason, and it took a week to find a data recovery company and then 1.5 months to do recovery + 2 months to bring in order what has been recovered. After that day I always create backups on external drives, on a regular basis :)

[@LummyTum]

How much did it cost?

[@creounity]

@@LummyTum Back then it costed me 15,000 roubles (198 usd at the exchange rate of those days).

[@Robin-eh2uo]

I had a hunch and just checked all of my drives. You just saved me from losing 500gb worth of data down the line. Thank you :)

[@nomisukeindustries]

Ahh. Nothing better than watching a relaxing LTT video only to be confronted by the horror that several of your drives are dying and you never would have known had it not been for this content.

[@25zerotwo]

Probably in a world of how it used to be, but I have long been a massive fan of Spinrite. Has recovered more than a few hardrives and data that was otherwise considered too bad to recover.

[@W0lfenstrike]

I've bought 4 "New Pull" HDDs over the span of 6 years and only one of them has failed 6 months ago, but granted it was the older one I bought. I'd say it's pretty safe to buy these types of drives, I've had OEM HDDs -especially from HP PC's and laptops- fail much faster (and way harder) than these used ones. Obviously YMMV, but I'd still say these types of drives are a pretty good deal IMO.

[@johnnybon258]

Thank you by telling me about crystal disc info you helped me save half of my data from failing with that device but it’s safe now because I’m trans ported it to my other healthy disc thanks so much

[@RobertBasilio]

That was a fun watch even without the information. There were so many little funny Easter eggs and little details

[@fungo6631]

Dios mio! La creatura!

[@bgaimur]

The editing and preview pic on this video are just brilliant. Love it.

[@freebite]

Another thing is, just touch it on occasion, or check the temps if it has that. Drives can get warm and sometimes, near death, they get damned hot even if they aren't making much noise. Had one from work where the motor was failing, but was failing in such a way it was generating a ton of heat, but not vibrating weirdly, though it was also reading and writing ridiculously slowly.

[@Rainydraven]

90 dollars for a hoodie!? 2 weeks ago I bought a full suit from brooks brothers for 84 dollars. They even gave 2 ties for free

[@broncodolphin]

It's funny, literally yesterday my 13 year old 1tb Drive just died

[@RiadRiad]

Holyyy, the boys oldd

[@broncodolphin]

@@RiadRiad yep, it was the oldest drive. Fortunately I've got a couple cold spares so it was a quick replacement

[@KanadeTachibanaBlackMidi]

we all learn from failures

[@SeezSantos]

This info is good to know! My 5 year old Seagate drive was taking a crap! Luckily I knew the symptoms and started slowly transfer the data off of it !

[@littlefish-ib1zb]

I have a 2.5 inch external WD Blue 500 GB drive from 2009 and it still works very well. I mainly keep old and rarely accessed files on it so I don’t have to worry too much of losing any important data when it will eventually fail (I expect a failure pretty soon now) . If you don’t use a hard drive too much, it can last decades, but you have to take good care of it.

[@rwiersema]

One thing you also need to be aware of is that when you want to use Enterprise disks in a PC you need to make sure the "power on reset" doesn't get a signal (mostly with older power supplies). When this pin gets power the hard drive will not spin up. Easiest way to fix this is using a molex to sata adapter.

[@Neoxon619]

Can’t you use SSDs as relatively large-scale storage for home use, or is it more expensive?

[@ShadowLinkxMaster]

SSDs have very limited write cycles, and it eventually dies when written to so many times. So while it theoretically have a long read-only life cycle, it’s not always the use-case.

[@Lucipher07]

SSDs are exponentially more expensive. a 20TB HDD costs about the same as an 8TB SSD. So if you have money to burn...

[@michaelf.2449]

Uh I feel like I've read that SSD's being unpowered for EXTENDED lengths can lose data.

[@AlucardNoir]

Good ones are between 4 to 8 times more expensive for the same storage and have a limited number of write times that is significantly inferior to what an HDD can bring to the table.

[@edwardallenthree]

Sure, and that's probably the recommended strategy for most uses just because of power consumption, which I'm very conscious of during this heatwave. That having been said, it gets expensive when your storage demands exceed about 4 terabytes.

[@nagi603]

2:14 High-capacity drives (10+TB) seem to perform self-checks that might also result in extra sounds.

[@WolfLover2019]

i actually have CrystalDiskInfo running in the background all the time and it notifies me if a problem has started with the HDD and fun fact: my (my old) Hearing aids have a t-coil mode that i can use to listen to the electrical signals coming off of the hard drive and i can tell if something is wrong with it...

[@sunxore]

SMART is (in my experience) totally unreliable. Disks die without ever giving an early warning through SMART. I just don't think hard drive vendors want to tell the customer that the disk is failing because they don't want warranty repairs, so it is not in their interest to signal early failure... Just treat disks as unreliable things and have a backup. No point in trying to predict anything here, really.

[@snowdaysrule]

Nailed it

[@potatoe4221]

How would you expect smart to report on mechanical failures?

[@p_x_]

I just wish there was a solid program that could actually interpret the individual SMART values without needing background in what they each mean. Past CrystalDiskInfo's "Good/Caution/Fail" that is.

[@linuxgeex]

According to a decade of extensive testing by Google across its millions of datacentre drives, SMART is not a reliable, or even unreliable, measure of the health of a hard drive. What boggles my mind is that the two of the three most reliable measures are completely ignored: sound and latency. Sound is mostly indicative of bearing wear, though it also speaks to behaviour which SMART should be reporting if it's problematic, ie uncorrectable error rate, which leads to... Higher latency is by far the most important metric. As a drive ages it has an increased media error rate, and that leads to it re-reading blocks and after a simple re-read fails - re-calibrating. It's the re-calibrating that is the most obvious audible behaviour change with an unhealthy drive. The latency is easy to ignore, but you do so at your peril. Lastly, spin-up duration is also indicative of both bearing health and media health. In a sane world the OS would be keeping stats for how long spin-up takes, and when a trend towards longer duration is established, the drive should be powered off and you should be warned to duplicate it in read-only mode before its imminent demise. SMART record, but not log, spin-up time. Out of context of past behaviour it's nearly meaningless.

[@dontakeshit]

Yep shoddy video

[@Pipe0481]

They do talk about sound though

[@DiabloOutdoors]

Amazing, just amazing... And I'm always baffled to hear about people with no backup, or those keeping all backups at the same locations. Same with people thinking you have no backup or all in one place instead of 3-4 different locations/old friends.

[@TheoLubbe]

My Hitachi Deathstar 80GB drives had this nifty self-test thing they'd do at roughly 1h45min intervals where you'd hear a series of whines at different pitches, and a click or two, before it'd go silent again. The first time I heard mine do this I was mortified at the thought of my brand-new drive already failing - especially since when I was using my mom's computer which had its batch-mate installed I noticed that drive did the same thing. Later I learned it was part of the drive's self-testing functionality, and I actually began enjoying the cute little hums/whines and clicks it would make.

[@NotMeta1738]

I want Anthony to take my hard drive for a test drive

[@RiadRiad]

I want Anthony to take me for a drive.. WAIT THAT SOUNDS wrooong

[@KYSMO]

I have an HDD at 16 percent health according to HD Sentinel and which clicks from time to time, but works flawlessly. My GFs HDD reports as being 100 percent health and started scratching like crazy and freezing her system. It's just a gamble.

[@uss_04]

The initial title was so non descriptive. I’m glad they hanged it and I semi guessed what the video was about based on the thumbnail and the fact that Anthony was in it.

[@LON3LYBON3S]

For 8 years I had a single HDD. it had everything, ran video games, had important personal files. Never died, still have it in my new system today

[@nikatto8]

8:23 some games especially older ones don't save online, ME legendary edition has constant issues where the save doesn't carry over to the cloud and the local save is your most recent option. I back up all of my save data using Google drives auto backup feature for that

[@patrickb6275]

i have been using 2 8 year old harddrives from an old pc for years. They always make really loud and clicky noises every time i start my pc. Havent run into any issues yet and didnt think much of the sounds. So thanks for this video its time for an upgrade! :D

[@hruettimann]

Well done, thank you for the video! Next time I’d love to see software recommendations and command line tips for other OS as well. At my work place there are no Windows systems, only macOS and Linux. And my personal mobile device is macOS as well.

[@0x8badf00d]

For Linux: smartctl, gnome-disks

[@JonathanSteadman2003]

I use smart once in a while to check my devices health. It's truly a great software to use to check if your drives are indeed failing. Gnome disks has a great smart tool. 🙂