My system is separated into three main drives with my Windows install on the nvme C:\ drive, my media on an 8TB mechanical drive and my ‘personal’ files on a 2TB drive. This latter drive began to fail.
I’ve used an excellent program for many years now, Free File Sync (from freefilesync.org) to handle my backups. I’d recently overhauled my whole desktop PC and the only accident (I am aware of) was my 2TB WD Purple from a foot height on to carpet. I’d plugged it in and thought nothing more of it because while I was setting up the new system, I barely touched any of my files.
One of my backups a week ago had failed on a couple of files because of a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) error. The files were large and insignificant (like a raspberry pi image and a graphics driver) so for quickness, I omitted them because I could always re-download them etc. Since that backup, I had a few file read errors on the drive and then a more recent backup failed on several files for the same reasons.
SMART is the Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology standard for computer storage to alert the OS and users of drive health issues and even predict failures. Windows will actually flag up SMART errors automatically when they occur but I still ran a SMART test on the drive and it passed. Still concerned about the CRC errors, I got hold of Western Digital’s software for inspecting drives: Kitfox (available here, replaces Data Lifeguard Diagnostic)
The software exposed that the drive was on the verge of failure. The model is a WD20PURX-64P6ZYO. The drive is over a decade old (WD 2TB Purple drives are still sold, current price on Amazon is £80) so it’s had a good innings. While my little drop may have broken the drive, I’m glad I became aware of it failing and ran the tests because it turns out the drive has been powered on for 64,000 hours… i.e. it has been running for over seven years!
I went with the purple drive because they are designed for CCTV systems with a high resilience. WD have all sorts of colours for different purposes and it is arguable to get the right colour for the right application. I have to say though, I’m really impressed. It was heating up recently as well and after the backup ran, the temperature was up to 73° C. Apparently this occurs due to friction when the mechanism of a drive is not operating optimally.
All in all, I caught this drive failure before it actually failed and, although my backups are done regularly, I didn’t have to endure any data loss. I managed to replace the drive with a spare 2TB Seagate drive from my cupboard. It has 10,000 hours on it already so with a typical hard drive life expectancy of 40,000 hours (five years), it should have some good life remaining in it.
I didn’t want to chance this drive though and this is always a practice worth undertaking any new drive placed into a system because if there is a fault, it is likely to appear early on: I tested it. I downloaded Seagate’s SeaTools (from here) and ran an extended test, which it passed. I’ve bitlocker encrypted it and transferred my files so all is well again.