140 Bad Blocks Suddenly Appear on External HardDrive. Beep When Unplugging. Is The Drive In Pre Failure?

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gracebee

Sep 22, 2018
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I have a 3 tb external HD by WD, which is about 3 years old and has always been kept at a desk. It currently has 1.6~ tbs of data on it.

I regularly run SMART checks, at least once a week, with DiskDrill. When backing up the drive to BackBlaze tonight, I had the slightest scape sound. My eyes narrowed as I eyed the disk and heard nothing more. *shrug* ...I finished backing up and unmounted the drive. Once unmounted, I unplugged it about 5 seconds later, and it gave one beep sound. I plugged it back in, repeated the unmounting and unplugged it after 5 seconds...the same beep sounded. I plugged it back in again, and this time waited 15+ seconds after unmounting to unplug...no beep.

I plugged it in again to view how full the drive was, and ran a SMART check with DiskDrill. It showed 4 bad sectors and a healthy drive, when prior reports had been 0 bad sectors. Cue Panick. I ran a Disk Utility, which revealed a healthy drive as well. I went back and ran another SMART check, and it showed 140 bad sectors. I unmounted and unplugged the drive, mounted it again, ran the SMART check again...8 bad sectors. Repeat. Now showing 140 bad sectors. The drive is also showing as doubled on the list of drives...one with 4 bad sectors and one with 136, with different internals in the sublist under the drives.

Is the drive failing or thinking about failing? Will Backblaze still backup the drive appropriately or will it leave out data already written on the drive on the bad sectors, if there is any data in those areas?

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Solution
USAFRet


My daily backups are to a Qnap NAS box.
And this is Incremental backups, going back 2 weeks. Tonights backup does not overwrite what was backed up last night. Or the day before.

And weekly, that entire Qnap gets backed up to an externally connected 8TB drive.

"bad sectors" would mean that a portion, or all, of a particular drive can't be read.
The backup...
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gracebee

Sep 22, 2018
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Thanks USAFRet - I have it backed up to Backblaze last week when all was seemingly well (I think), so I'm not concerned about that, but I would like to know which files are affected so I can ensure I get them back. I can select a backup copy from Backblaze from 2 weeks ago to be sure I don't miss corrupted files that might be MIA in the most recent backup, but an older backup could also be missing a few files from the most recent.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Mar 16, 2013
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If you have ALL of it backed up from last week, then it doesn't really matter what is or isn't valid on this drive.

Given a failing drive, all you can read is what is good, not what parts have already failed.
 
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gracebee

Sep 22, 2018
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Ok, is there any way to program a new drive to move good data to safe sectors when a sector goes bad? Are you supposed to replace a drive when even 1 sector suddenly goes bad?
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Drives do that automatically by themselves.
If possible, reallocate to good sectors, and ignore bad ones.

"replace a drive "?
Just know that ALL drives die. Some today, some in 20 years. But it WILL die.

I had a drive that was only 5 weeks old go from great to dead in about 36 hours.
How to prevent tears? Backup backup backup.
 
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gracebee

Sep 22, 2018
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Ok, the software I'm using to read the SMART status is DiskDrill. According to their website, they mark soft bad sectors, meaning software miscommunication/issues? Does that still mean the disk is toast, or is it safe to wipe it clean and repair it by zeroing everything on the drive? Then reload my data onto it?
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Sure, you can try that.
But still treat is as suspect...as you should do with every single drive you use. Both old and new.
 
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gracebee

Sep 22, 2018
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It says 136 of the bad blocks are in the EFI. 4 are in the big partition for data storage. Again, there is no way to obtain a list of which files specifically are on those bad sectors and essentially dead? I want to make sure I get them from Backblaze.

Are any external harddrive companies more reliable in your opinion, than others? I have a 6 year old WD My Passport running like a champ, but this newer 3 year old WD My Passport Ultra is obviously having issues. I would go with a WD SSD for reliability but it's so expensive to purchase 3 tbs in SSD. I also had an old Seagate that survived for 10 YEARS and just died. I've heard a lot of negative press on in the past 5 years Seagate drives failing.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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On an individual drive basis...your drive...there is no difference.

If Company A has an overall average of a drive dying at 3.5 years, and Company B drives die at 3 years...that means absolutely nothing in respect to the singular drive that sits on your desk.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Not any one make or model over another.

In my realm here, I have a mix of Seagate and WD HDD's, both internal and external.
A mix of Sandisk, Kingston, Samsung SSD's.

I am brand agnostic. I do not care about the physical drives.
I DO know that drive death is the least likely form of data loss. Hence, routine backups. My main system does a Full or Incremental backup every night.

The data on those drives is the important thing.
All drives are suspect, right out of the box.
 
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gracebee

Sep 22, 2018
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Since your system does backups every night, are they backing up to another drive, or to a cloud service? What happens when in a case like mine, sectors go bad on drive 1...when you back up to drive 2, does it erase formerly written data on drive 2 from the bad sector on drive 1? (hope that makes sense) Is there a way to setup an alert if a sector goes bad?
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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My daily backups are to a Qnap NAS box.
And this is Incremental backups, going back 2 weeks. Tonights backup does not overwrite what was backed up last night. Or the day before.

And weekly, that entire Qnap gets backed up to an externally connected 8TB drive.

"bad sectors" would mean that a portion, or all, of a particular drive can't be read.
The backup procedure would have told me of such, and then I could go into disaster recovery mode. And recover the previous data to a different drive or location.

My specific backup routine listed here: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3383768/backup-situation-home.html
 
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