Is this drive slowly dying?

[YeOldeStonecat]

Not my choice – the disk is already saying that it can't read some sectors, so it isn't going to provide a useful clone. You'll just get the same data corruption but unreported. Cue unexplainable software problems coming up.

Based on thousands and thousands of clones...very often you can get right through it and we have crazy numbers of those cloned drives working great in service as I type this. The OP stated the clients computer is running slow. He didn't state it's constantly blue screening or locking up or has event viewer with an application log filled with red marks about corrupted programs. Very likely those couple of bad sectors on the source drives are simply marked and not used by the drive. Good clone hardware/software gets right through it. You'd be amazed at how successful even cloning a drive from a computer that was at the point of locking up or blue screening is.

We're mostly MSP, and only biz clients, so when we fix something and it comes back to bite us..that's a loss for us, so we avoid solutions that bring repeat calls for the same problem. if cloning failing drives had a high risk of "cuing unexplainable..problems" we'd have been avoiding doing this decades ago.

 

[Alexey]

Not my choice – the disk is already saying that it can't read some sectors, so it isn't going to provide a useful clone. You'll just get the same data corruption but unreported. Cue unexplainable software problems coming up.

If your cloner can put an identifiable pattern into bad blocks, you can do this

• Clone, specifying some unique pattern for bad block filler;
• run CHKDSK on the clone (in case one of the filesystem metadata sectors did not read; I don't think this will be the case here - not enough visible problems for unreadable filesystem sectors);
• search all files on the clone for the pattern.

This will give you a full list of affected files. I'm not sure how useful it would be in this specific case, but the procedure does exist.

 

[Porthos]

That's easy - it's one, and now that hard drives are practically free and SSDs are affordable for most people there's a pretty good case for zero reported defects if you have any other reason to suspect the drive.

Hardware is cheap, data loss is very expensive. Why take the chance?

+1000

 

[Krynn72]

From reading this Forum for many years, there does not seem to be universal agreement on how many bad sectors there has to be before you replace the drive.

Really? Because I have gotten the exact opposite impression. This forum seems to have a very clear consensus that when it comes to hard drives... If there's any doubt what so ever, swap it out. As has already been said, there's basically no benefit to trying to diagnose this issue to save the drive.

You're costing your client more money via labor costs via hemming and hawing about it, doing research and etc. Whats your hourly rate, vs the cost of a new HDD or sufficient SSD? It should be very clearly in the clients best interest to just swap it and be done with it. Unless you're just eating the time yourself in which case now you're just wasting your own time with unbillable work that either ends up with you replacing the drive anyways, or leaves you uncertain that you've provided a long term solution.

And thats not to say anything of the risks of data loss by trying to prolong the use of the drive.

Any way you cut it, it doesn't make sense. If in doubt, swap it out.

 

[glennd]

Really? Because I have gotten the exact opposite impression. This forum seems to have a very clear consensus that when it comes to hard drives... If there's any doubt what so ever, swap it out. As has already been said, there's basically no benefit to trying to diagnose this issue to save the drive.

You're costing your client more money via labor costs via hemming and hawing about it, doing research and etc. Whats your hourly rate, vs the cost of a new HDD or sufficient SSD? It should be very clearly in the clients best interest to just swap it and be done with it. Unless you're just eating the time yourself in which case now you're just wasting your own time with unbillable work that either ends up with you replacing the drive anyways, or leaves you uncertain that you've provided a long term solution.

And thats not to say anything of the risks of data loss by trying to prolong the use of the drive.

Any way you cut it, it doesn't make sense. If in doubt, swap it out.

Agreed. Hard drives don't get better, they only get worse.

 

[Porthos]

Agreed. Hard drives don't get better, they only get worse.

And you have no hope of "fixing" a failing drive.

 

[GTP]

There was an old saying that still applies, "there are only two types of hard drive: those that have failed and those that are about to fail."

 

[fincoder]

I always tell my customers that every hard drive will fail, sooner or later, it's impossible to know when, maybe tomorrow, maybe next month, maybe in 10 years.