r/HDD

Hey everyone,

I just bought a pair of 14TB Seagate Exos X16 drives (ST14000NM001G). One will go into my main Windows PC for primary storage, and I'm planning to attach the second via an external USB enclosure to a 24/7 laptop.

The laptop is on Windows and already running Pi-hole (VMware), TeslaMate (Docker), Home Assistant (VMware), and playing media on my TV. I want to use the second drive as a local backup target for the PC.

What’s the best way to set this up, and what software do you recommend? My main goal is to keep the primary copy on my PC and push a 2nd copy (backup) to the laptop's external drive over the local network.

Thanks!

Purchased brand new from Amazon on July 24. Used in part of an SHR storage pool. Got this error today: An I/O error occured while accessing this drive. (Read error: [08/16/2026 12:32] at Sector [7324315896]). Replace drive immediatly.

Has this happened to anyone else? I'm getting it replaced with Amazon, but that's concerning. Is this common?

I’m currently using a 4TB HDD as my secondary drive for documents and games, with a 1TB SSD as my boot drive. The HDD has started getting noticeably slow, and I suspect it’s on its way out, so I’m planning to replace it with a 6TB HDD.

What’s the best way to move all my data over and swap the drives without causing issues?

I have a 2‑bay HDD dock that supports cloning. Can I simply clone the old HDD to the new one and then assign the same drive letter, or is there anything else I need to do?

I bought a couple of recertified 12TB enterprise drives from ServerPartDeals each a while back, which was roughly half of what the same drive costs now. One of them developed 57 reallocated sectors during normal use, so I sent it back for an RMA under the 2-year warranty.

The thing I was worried about ended up happening: they just refunded me. I got back exactly what I paid, $165, while the same drive currently sells for around double that. The refund doesn't come close to replacing the drive at today's prices. I did ask whether they could send an equivalent drive instead of a refund, but in the end they issued the refund.

So if you picked up a drive cheap when prices were low, and it isn't in seriously bad shape, it may be worth reconsidering an RMA. Weigh the refund you'd actually get against what a replacement costs today.

Depending on the numbers, keeping the drive in service (with good backups and monitoring) until it genuinely fails might make more sense than sending it back for a refund that won't replace it. Curious if others have run into the same thing with recertified drives and rising prices.

(English isn't my first language, so I used AI to help translate this. Apologies if anything reads a little oddly.)

The drive is new and empty. It is formatted NTFS. I have run all of the utilities recommended:

sfc/scannow

chkdsk /r /f

etc., etc. Zero issues found.

Backup files appear to have been written, but the backup fails at the end when creating the system image.

Is there a solution or is the 32TB drive unacceptable for backup purposes.

So I'm looking for hdd for long term cold storage for media files. Right now I'm looking at WD elements 10tb and 16tb wd my book (only 140 eur more expensive). My question is are they reliable?

My father took my brother's HDD to a repair shop behind his back and formatted it and reinstalled Windows because it had a password. Now my brother has lost 10+ years of all of his personal and work and study files.

My heart's completely shattered for him. He works so hard :((

How can I reliably recover his data for him? Please advise me.