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

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:

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MUSIC CREDIT
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Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

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

[kristianau]

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.

[justalpha]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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!

[DarkSideKyp]

“Failure is always an option!” -Adam Savage

[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.

[sburton]

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.

[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.

[carl.will.larson]

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

[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.

[nicka]

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

[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.

[Petar]

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

[_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.

[jasonbalicki]

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.

[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

[ayrtontv]

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

[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.