Many (it not most) drives that spin 24/7, and survive the initial spike of the (), will not die due to bad sectors, but instead die due to electrical components wearing out. It does so by reading parameters provided by the drive itself, but they don’t know the whole truth. Smart attempts to predict when the drive will fail. Seagate has a nice DOS based GUI tool for drive diagnostics but they will only work with their brand. THere are tools that do this for you, plentiful. Then if there are no problems there and your PSU is good, do the test i mentioned where you read/write to drive and check SMART while doing it. You can search the net for drive symptoms based on sound. Typically mechanical errors and issues are logged but may not appear in SMART but rather elsewhere. Since you can see inside the drive, you can inspect it, but its best to turn it on and put a ear on for sounds as that can help for mechanical issues. \- an internal mechanical disaster happened \- transfer errors happened that the drive was dropped (could be bad connector or wire) some drives have protection so the wrong voltage in will trigger a shutdown (for WD they fry instead). \- drive is vibrating too much, balancing mechanism or sensor triggered to halt drive What you need to do is read the SMART data while doing a read/write operation.Ī few things that could be happening but not trigger during a test And last, a marginal HDD that I plan to replace soon:
