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Click of death status update
8 years ago
General
Managed to recover about 45GB of most vital 10 year long data and then some.
Here's the status:
It's 25 Celsius at home, with humidity at 50-60 since its raining some of the days.
The hard drive starts up fine. Fired it up 5 times.
In one case lasted up to 48 minutes before I shutdown the rig to let the drive cool.
Had 2 clicking freeze ups (followed by manual power button long press shutdown) and 3 OK normal shutdowns.
Noticed again that the case of the hard drive tends to warm up, especially when the clicking happened.
Had 1 FileExplorer crash-restart for no reason, but this did not follow with the clicks.
In one case I tried to copy about 10GB in one go and it froze up clicking.
In another it was a 50MB over a year old PDF file.
So I cant just copy-paste the whole drives.
My guess so far: couple of bad sectors and a bad drive motor
Unplugged the drive until further notice.
P.S.
Never before in my life has raindrops on metal and plastic temperature deformation made me so jumpy.
Here's the status:
It's 25 Celsius at home, with humidity at 50-60 since its raining some of the days.
The hard drive starts up fine. Fired it up 5 times.
In one case lasted up to 48 minutes before I shutdown the rig to let the drive cool.
Had 2 clicking freeze ups (followed by manual power button long press shutdown) and 3 OK normal shutdowns.
Noticed again that the case of the hard drive tends to warm up, especially when the clicking happened.
Had 1 FileExplorer crash-restart for no reason, but this did not follow with the clicks.
In one case I tried to copy about 10GB in one go and it froze up clicking.
In another it was a 50MB over a year old PDF file.
So I cant just copy-paste the whole drives.
My guess so far: couple of bad sectors and a bad drive motor
Unplugged the drive until further notice.
P.S.
Never before in my life has raindrops on metal and plastic temperature deformation made me so jumpy.
Here it is 28 degrees celsius inside even at night, unless I run the air conditioner. Outside, it is often 30 even at night.
I know my advice comes late, but... backup, often. I do it at least 3 times a year, copying over vital data (yeah that includes furry art and referenc screenshots I took... ) to a separate HD I otherwise never use and keep locked away.
I hear there are softwares and companies specializing in restoring crashed drives. My brother-in-law once tried them and they managed to restore some data.
The dam thing lasted me for 10 years with little to no trouble. That's double the expected HDD lifespan. Its about time I retire it.
But it is time to invest into a backup unit of some sorts.
My first HDD failure was what, 15 years ago or longer? Back when we only burned stuff to CDs, not even DVDs... So I kinda learned my lesson there and then to always back up everything, especially my own art.