r/HDD

I recently bought a 4tb Seagate OneTouch external HDD, and as storage costs an arm and a leg these days, I wanted to fully test it for errors.

The drive showed up in windows as normal, and I was able to create a root folder, but when I opened Seatools the strange events started. First thing I noticed was that it was showing up in windows as 3.7tb, but seatools showed it as 16.1tb, then I noticed it had a strange name, something like " 4 xxxxx" where x is some random numbers I dont remember. I had never seen spaces in a drive name before so it just looked odd.

I ran the long generic test, and went to have dinner. About 30mins later I came back, and it was still on 0%, so I decided to cancel it, and run some short tests first. When I ran the short generic test, the drive just disconnected completely, and was missing in explorer, and while the safe eject icon was still in my system tray, the drive didn't show there.

I reconnected the drive, and the name of the drive had changed, to "HITACHIxxxxxxxxx" but it still showed as a 16tb drive. I tried a couple of the other tests, all of them disconnected in the same way.

I then tried GSmartControl and again, it showed as 16tb, and disconnected from all tests in the same way. I tried different cables and usb sockets, same issues.

Then I tried the chkdisk /r and it did not disconnect, and it is currently still running. After leaving it on all night, it is doing about 1% per hour, and is currently at 9%

Is it normal to take so long (it is a small portable drive, so I expected it to be slow), I have never had problems like this with a drive and just want to know are any of these issues red flags to more experienced users, or even just an explanation for any of the strange behaviour. I have 14 days to return it, so want to get some advice quickly :)

speccy results:

Hitachi HTS543232A7A384 SCSI Disk Device

Manufacturer	Hitachi

Product Family	Travelstar

Series Prefix	Standard

Model Capacity For This Specific Drive	320GB

Heads	16

Cylinders	2,054,154

Tracks	523,809,270

Sectors	32,999,984,010

SATA type	SATA-II 3.0Gb/s

Device type	Fixed

ATA Standard	ATA8-ACS

Serial Number	E20342BM1XJ39J

Firmware Version Number	ES2OA60W

LBA Size	48-bit LBA

Power On Count	Unknown

Power On Time	Unknown

Speed	5400 RPM

Features	S.M.A.R.T., APM, NCQ

Max. Transfer Mode	SATA II 3.0Gb/s

Used Transfer Mode	SATA II 3.0Gb/s

Interface	USB (SATA)

Capacity	15735 GB

Real size	16,896,000,000,512 bytes

RAID Type	None

	S.M.A.R.T

		Status	Unknown

	Partition 0

		Partition ID	Disk #6, Partition #0

		Size	3.64 TB

I've been wondering what actually happens to hard drives when people get rid of old computers. Even if a computer is too old to use, it might still contain personal files or other sensitive information. Is wiping a drive enough before recycling it, or do you prefer physically destroying it? I'd be interested to hear what people with IT experience usually recommend.

I have a secondary drive that I've been using for about a year and a half, and I've filled it with very important and sensitive information. All of a sudden, Windows is asking me to format the drive to use it, which is something I've never needed to do until now. I really don't wanna format it because the information I filled it with is only located in that drive and nowhere else, so is there anything I can do?

Edit: I have a WD Passport, not sure if that will help but I figured why not include it

Hallo, ik ben nieuw hier.

Ik heb geen idee of ik het goed doe...

Ik heb een losse externe harde schijf van WD Elements. Deze heb ik ooit met mijn stomme kop versleuteld. En je kan wel raden wat er nu gebeurd na jaren dat ik hem gevonden heb... geen idee waar de sleutel is..

Bestaat er een manier om er toch in te komen? Of moet ik dan een of andere ITer / hacker in de hand nemen om hem open te maken?

Thanks voor de hulp!

Hi!

I bought a PC V2000 Plus to use as a fileserver since it has so many drive bays, but unfortunately the seller had lost most of the hard drive screws.

Is there anywhere I can source replacements, or anything that might work? I've searched everywhere and came up empty.

If anyone has a solution I'd be eternally grateful.

Hi, everyone. I recently bought four 2 TB hard drives at a flea market, but when I got home, I realized they had a SAS interface, not SATA. I know I need to buy an IT-mode HBA controller with cables for them to work. Is it worth buying the controller and installing it in my home lab to use them for storage, or should I just resell them? (It’s worth noting that I have another SAS-compatible computer and that I’ve tested each of the drives: they all worked fine. The four drives have less than 5,000 hours of use, which surprises me, and they have no reallocated sectors.)