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Possible Bad Hard Drive

  • Thread starter Deleted member 278999
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Deleted member 278999

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We moved and the soon to be Mrs. Kwaz put an extra hard drive that I had lying around in a random box. This is the ol' spinning type. A 1TB WD Caviar Black to be specific. I know some HD's have platter brakes and so forth. I'm not sure what kind of protections this drive has.

My fault for leaving it lying around. She doesn't know what a hard drive looks like.

This was a drive I'd planned on using for backing up a non critical RAID 0 array. Critical documents are backed up elsewhere in addition to. This is probably one of those if you have to ask... kind of things but I'm more curious. I don't believe there's a way to check if there was any damage done.

Personally I'm calling it toast. Do you think it's worth keeping or should I feed it to the chop saw?
 
I believe you can run SpinRite on it for free, but fixing the drive, you have to pay for the full version.
 
The only diagnostic you can truly put any faith in is the one provided by the manufacturer of any given drive, in this case that would be Western Digital and their Data Lifeguard diagnostic tool which can be found at this link:

Software and Firmware Downloads | WD Support

Second one, to be precise. Download it, extract it (doesn't need to be installed), run the WinDLG.exe file (use Admin rights, right click on the exe and choose Run as Administrator so it has the proper hardware level access), select the drive (assuming it's mechanically/electronically sound enough to be detected by Windows, of course), then click the tiny hard drive icon to select Quick Test and run it to completion. If it fails at any point you'll get a warning about it. If it completes without issues, then immediately run the Extended test (which will take much much longer obviously). After that it'll either tell you the drive is fine or has a problem of some kind (the info provided isn't necessarily helpful, of course). If it's still under warranty (a retail drive, OEM drives don't get the same treatment) you might be able to get it replaced.

S.M.A.R.T. data alone cannot be trusted, only the diagnostic from the manufacturer of the drive is what matters.
 
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