HDD failure!!!

[Bigman80]

Oli, sorry to hear of your HDD failure. Here is some advice and observations for what it’s worth. I have worked in IT for over 30 years and HDD especially spinning ones have a life, in my experience if used daily you’ll be lucky to get 5 years. There are several issues that can cause failure, bearing wears out causing mistracking, bearing/mechanism of read/write arm fails, electronics controlling the thing fail. The drive map is at one part of the drive this is accessed all the time causing wear to the drive.

Generally it’s the read/write head, signs of this getting passed its sell by date are longer times read and writing data, if you run tests to check the drive you will see more block errors. If this is happening it’s time to replace.

So plan to replace every 4-5 years if spinning disk drives. If it is a solid state drive(chips) these fail, they are a mass of miniaturised on/off switches put simply and after a while they will fail through use. Usually failure is catastrophic and can stop any data recovery.

If data is really important then buy a NAS drive with multiple hard drives and set up with RAID so one is a mirror of the main drive, if and when one fails you just pull the failure out and plug in the new one and RAID will then re-copy from the good drive. I would still have another external backup drive that an incremental backup is run to at least once a week.

Plug your failed drive into computer and put it to your ear, if you can hear it repeatedly clicking then the read/write mechanism has failed. If this is the case to recover data the physical drive needs to be taken out and put in another with a good read/write head. Trying to access the data with a failed read/write head may damage the disk(s).

I hope you sort it out ok

All the Best

Adrian

Ok Adrian.

Thanks

[Bigman80]

youtube vid on how to fix maybe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m5cil6KezI

I'll have a watch. Thanks Grant.

[struth]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5Y7BniaRXg

another one which is very similar. Should be manageable if this is the cause

[NRG]

That’s bad luck Oli, I would never recommend taking the lid of a hard drive unless it is the very very last thing to try. They are sealed for a reason and really should only be opened in a clean air environment but if you are stuck then you can try it but the drive is effectively junk afterwards as you cannot guarantee what particles may have got in there...don’t rely on that drive for storing any precious data!

[simon g]

I mostly use iCloud back up; I really can't see that failing any time soon! Obviously, not critical or personal data, that I keep backed up locally on a hard drive. First is hard drive on MBP, other is SSD device stored in my fire/flood resistant safe. Further copy held elsewhere. But iCloud is main storage/back up; all just works seamlessly and allows access across all my devices. I do love how Apple products all just get on with the job, compared to the endless faffing about I had with MS products.