Is my hard drive finished

[jon76]

Hi all, just had a notification pop up in windows saying it had detected a hard drive problem, it's a Samsung spinpoint 1TB. It's only about 2 years old, it's in a desktop, so it doesn't exactly get knocked about, I ran a scan and found this. Is there any chance it's something other than a dead drive, I just can't believe a well looked after drive could die so early, sorry about poor quality, it wouldn't let me post jpeg as it said I was over my quota, and my photobucket trial has endede, it says short dstfail

 

[johnb35]

Do the long test and see the results. But most generally the drive needs to be replaced. Doesn't matter how well you take care of HDD's, they are a mechanical device and will break down at anytime.

 

[beers]

I'd back up the data ASAP and see if your drive is still within a warranty window for replacement.

As stated, HDD can fail randomly even in the best of environments.
I have a pair of Spinpoint F1 750 GB drives from back in the day. One of them failed after ~8 months and was RMA replaced. The other original one from the same enclosure is still going strong, so it's really luck of the draw.

 

[jon76]

Thanks, I had feared the response would be to replace the drive, but I was just hoping, I did a test on the second drive and this also failed, which is scary as it's the backup drive, does seem strange both would fall at the same time, I' m wondering if some sort of disk wipe with dban or something could help, I seem to remember a drive I did before taking about 8 hours though. I think I have a couple of 160gb drive's lying about, so might try and back everything up on there for now until I can afford to buy a new main drive and a new backup drive

 

[jon76]

Update: turns out I might be okay, the back up drive I had was an old one I got of my brother for free, I noticed the drive windows said was failing was that one, so I copied it all back onto the main drive after the format, removed the old drive I was using for backup and I haven't had a warning since, there was something not right about the program I was using to scan the drives (or I didn't use it right). My plan now: get a 1TB external backup drive so I know everything's safe and carry on using my main drive as normal, thanks all

 

[Darren]

If a drive starts throwing out errors and problems it probably won't last much longer, even if it's working okay now. Make sure you get everything backed up.