[PC] - HDD just died

One of my internal 2TB HDDs just failed.

Good thing is, I have a backup on my NAS, this disk was basically the torrent download disk for MAME/MESS and Pinball stuff.

Annoying thing is, that I was downloading 2 bigger sets to it, the PSX set, which is 450GB, and the NGC set, which is 665GB, so quite a lot.

I noticed yesterday, that on the NGC torrent, I got cycling redundancy check errors, so I tried relaunching it, but still gave me the errors. Then I copied most of the stuff to my NAS, also the PSX set, and already during copying I got several times a message from Windows that the disk has problems. Today I managed then to copy at least most of the stuff to my NAS, and eventually did a disk check. That ran for several hours, and when Windows finally booted again, I got the message to backup my stuff, the disk has errors.

I can still reach it, get to my files and everything, but at some point, it gives me an error. So I guess it's not long anymore before it completely dies.

Windows event logs:

Originally Posted by :
Warning:

The driver has detected that device \Device\Harddisk2\DR2 has predicted that it will fail. Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent.

And this one came hundreds of times:

Originally Posted by :
Error:

The device, \Device\Harddisk2\DR2, has a bad block.

I expect because you were downloaded such large torrents that it encounters a specific region on the disk with bad blocks, causing all this. The faulty part might have been there some time.

It is good that you had warnings and time to access it and act.

It is possible with hdd tools to scan through a disk and mark bad blocks as off limits, so the disk can be partitioned and formatted ok again. Personally though I would remain worried that more of the disk would fail later.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4

I ordered an SSD now, and got it today. Windows is giving me now messages every 5 minutes that the disk in question is faulty. I wanted to buy an SSD anyway at some point, so I will move my C: partition to it, then use that one as a replacement for the dead HDD, and just use the SSD as C: partition. I won't have time to build it in this week, but it will be the first thing I do next week, probably Monday.

I bought a Samsung 840 Pro 256, seems to be reliable and one of the fastest SSDs on the market. It got best reviews everywhere, only negative point it almost got everywhere, was the a bit too high price, but it's not that much more.

http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/m...ge/MZ-7PD256BW

Btw, the SSD is running since some weeks now. Booting is over 10x faster, but I barely reboot my PC, it's running 24/7. Programs also start a lot faster, but otherwise, I don't use an SSDs full potential.

An SSD is really at its best used just for the OS, for fast booting as you say. Remember to move the Windows virtual memory cache off from the SSD to another drive, otherwise it will great reduce the life of the SSD with the constant rewrites.

I don't use any page file at all anymore, since nowadays we have a lot of RAM, it's not needed.

True, except Windows still likes to have access for certain things sometimes, and some (badly coded software) expects it. Older games can sometimes complain or just crash f.ex.