Hard drive dying a death? (Version 2!)

Gray

FH is my second home
Joined
Dec 25, 2003
Messages
3,422
Well after the heartbreak of my external hard drive failing a few months ago, i was unable to retrieve any information off of it, which was utterly gutting but i did go out and buy a new external hard drive. Thankfuck i did as well.

My old primary drive (320gb Western Digital WD3200YS) become a secondary backup drive since i got some SSD drives. All has been well.

However the past few months i had been hearing a strange whizzing and sort of clicking noise like the hard drive was powering up. More often than not, this occured when i would access the drive, but it would be relatively noisy.

It did cross my mind if the drive would be dying or not, but i plodded on. However the past few nights it;s been getting worse. The drive itself would vanish from My Computer taking with it my backup SSD drive as well.

A quick reset solved the issue though, that is until today. The hard drive vanished, again. I reset the computer. It did not come back though, the difference this time is that the computer was hanging on the BIOS/Motherboard screen for upto a minute before loading into Windows 7.

This was the exact same symptom that my-now dead external hard drive was showing. When i came back into Windows the hard drive was not there, felt like i had been hit by a train then because i was shitting it thinking back to when i last backed up my hard drive onto my external, thankfully it was in the last month so any potential loss would have been minimal.

The BIOS wasn't showing the hard drive, nor was device manager. I powered it off the computer totally - This time it booted immediately, and the hard drive was back. However about an hour or so later, it vanished again.

More concerning, the computer was lagging on the BIOS screen regardless now, and it wasn't showing up no matter how many times i powered down. Shit i thought.

At this point i opted to "cooldown" the computer and left it off for about an hour or more, came back. Voila. It was back, i quickly backed up any shit i didn't have so now i'm not massively concerned.

But this leaves me with a feeling whether i can trust this hard drive or not, somehow i think it might be time to change it - But then i haven't kept a check on hard drive prices since i've gone SSD so meh.
 

Embattle

FH is my second home
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
13,214
Have you used http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=605&sid=3&lang=en to test it? (Be warned these tests can be somewhat taxing so backup before hand)

HD drive prices rocketed last year and although they've come down they are still about 40% more expensive than they were pre Thailand floods, probably aren't going to decrease much more either with less competitors (Seagate bought Samsungs HDD business) and demand still strong at the higher price point.
 

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