Windows 8 "SMART Hard Drive detects imminent failure Attribute failed: #5"

[badrobot]

I haven't had any hard drive problems except for accidental partition deletion, etc. I got this message last night from 1 of my drives and also a boot-up warning telling me which drive is failing. I've already moved out all my data from it. I also run a DPS Self Test which gives me a Code 4 error. Is there any hope for this hard drive or I just simply need to toss it away? I think this hard drive (a 3.5" Seagate 1TB 7200rpm) is about 5 years old.

 

[Joe S]

You might formatting by writing zeroes to it but I wouldn't trust it very far.
Joe

 

[patcooke]

Having secured all your data you could safely run a full forensic wipe on the disk which would give it some intensive work to do across the entire drive (a number of times if you opt for a good number of passes - but be prepared to leave it running all night!). Then run another full test on it, but even then, as Joe says, I would still be wary of it. Having said that, I never trust any form of storage on any computer - everything I have stored is backed up in three different places! Paranoid? No, just been around a long time.

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

If you ever have to move stuff from a failing drive it seems best to do it a little bit at a time.
Having it running on and on seems to hasten the failure rate.

I had a friend who decided after many years, to finally back up everything on his hard drive, so he started the process to backup the entire drive using a backup program, instead of just copying the data a little bit at a time.

The drive died during the process, the backup file was unreadable, and ironically he lost all his data in the backup process.
I think he still blames me for telling him he should back up his data. LOL

Sometimes you can't win.

Mike

 

[badrobot]

This hard drive is actually an external backup drive. I was just getting it ready to be transferred to the new 2-bay NAS device (Qnap TS-220) that I bought the other day. I moved out all the data to another 2TB hard drive temporarily because it will be formatted to Ext4 (from NTFS) once I installed it to the NAS device. Good thing it happened before I even get it installed. I also have another brand new hard drive to be paired with it but I guess I will just get another one since I can't rely on this one anymore. Yeah, I also have redundant backups of my files. I never save my data on the same drive as the OS even on my Win 8 tablet. I have SSD boot up drive on all my PCs and separate drives for the files. And every year, I burn all photos and important files on a blu-ray disc as physical backups. So I guess I am more paranoid. Hahaha.

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Welcome to the Paranoid club.
I have 2 internal drives, one with Windows and all my data on the other 3 partitions.

3 external drives with all of my important stuff backed up to more the one of them.
And some really important stuff backed up to all 3 and online.

You can't be too safe.

Mike

 

[badrobot]

Tell me about it Mike!

I have 4 internals (2 SSDs & 2 HDDs), 2 External (USB 3.0s) and 1 network drive. Now I am just about to setup my new NAS.