Sunday 09 Apr 2023

My Hard Drive Failed

I had recently completed a full backup a few days ago onto this drive. The drive worked well and I managed to grab a SMART data output to check nothing was failing. This is an old drive used as an extra backup drive.

A few days later, I needed to run another backup. I put the drive back in, it spun up then: beeping, buzzing and clicking and was not readable by Windows.

The SMART statistics from 2 days prior to failure were marked as Good (CrystalDiskInfo). Unfortunately the programme exported the SMART values in hex, so I converted them to decimal.

Here are the important values:

Power On Hours: 359 hours
Power On Count: 193 count
0 Spin-Up Time
263 Start/Stop Count
0 Reallocated Sectors Count
257633613250919 (2.93 years) Power-On Hours
0 Spin Retry Count
0 Current Pending Sector Count
0 Uncorrectable Sector Count

I was happy with the SMART statistics to continue using the drive. The drive is > 6 years old, but due to being a backup drive had only 263 start/stop counts. I am dubious about the power-on hours being 2.9 years.

This drive was an old accessory drive to my backup plan and will therefore not be replaced. See my post on B2.