Storage Solutions HDD not spinning up, any troubleshooting steps or is it toast?

D

DentFuse

Disciple
Hello everyone,

I have a Seagate Barracuda from 2019, very sparingly used which I was using in a home NAS server. This drive was acting as a backup for the main drive, every night at 3AM the system with save a snapshot of the main drive to this drive. Recently (~3-4months ago) I noticed that this drive showed a caution in the dashboard, apparently SMART had reported that it had ~40 bad sectors. I knew is was a prefail sign but didn't think much of it. Even in the system the drive was mostly turned off, after only 3 mins of inactivity using hd-idle.

Now I went out of town last at the start of March and hadn't turned on the server since. Today I turned it on to backup some data and noticed that the drive wasn't showing up. This had happened exactly once before but was resolved by swapping around cables, however today after much troubleshooting I noticed that the drive wasn't spinning up at all, and ofc BIOS wasn't recognizing it either. One interesting thing to note was that Debian was still waiting for the drive to respond and would fail after a time out, is this because a drive was once connected to it or because the controller on the drive works and but the platters themselves don't?

Anyways, what should be my steps ahead? Are there any troubleshooting steps I could try? I've tried changing SATA cables, port, and even the SATA power cable, nothing helped.

Also are HDD really this unreliable? I've had almost all my HDD that I bought within the last 5-6 years fail on me within 2-3 years of use.
 
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Drive is toast, if anything of importance is there you can hand it over to professional data recovery companies and pay hefty amounts to recover your data with no guarantees.

Also for next time with HDDs, don't think that stopping the drive from spinning during idle times is any beneficial. It does more harm than good. Starting and stopping a motor takes a toll on it. This is why server drives never have an idle stop, they keep running all the time and rarely fail in years.
 
enthusiast29 said:
Drive is toast, if anything of importance is there you can hand it over to professional data recovery companies and pay hefty amounts to recover your data with no guarantees.

Also for next time with HDDs, don't think that stopping the drive from spinning during idle times is any beneficial. It does more harm than good. Starting and stopping a motor takes a toll on it. This is why server drives never have an idle stop, they keep running all the time and rarely fail in years.
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I second this. People have become over-anxious as to how a device operates and how they want to drive them.
Just let them take their care themselves without doing/applying unnecessary tricks/tweaks.
 
enthusiast29 said:
Also for next time with HDDs, don't think that stopping the drive from spinning during idle times is any beneficial. It does more harm than good. Starting and stopping a motor takes a toll on it.
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I'm already aware of this. This decision was taken after taking this into consideration. The drive wasn't accessible via the NAS and was only written to while taking the backup at night, which lasted <10mins in most cases. Hence I didn't really see a need for it to be running for long intervals.

lockhrt999 said:
Of course not. Check if your SMPS is okay. It could be killing the HDDs.
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SMPS is (probably) fine. This was the only internal HDD that failed on me while completely idle. Other two were externals.
 
DentFuse said:
Also are HDD really this unreliable? I've had almost all my HDD that I bought within the last 5-6 years fail on me within 2-3 years of use.
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It means your psu isn't supplying pure voltage on the power rails.
What PSU you using?
I have hdds as old as 15yrs going strong in my pc right now running regularly. In fact old era hdds are much much reliable having minute failure rates compared to todays drives.
 
DentFuse said:
SMPS is (probably) fine. This was the only internal HDD that failed on me while completely idle. Other two were externals.
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So? the 5V distributed by the USB comes from SMPS too.

Or are you saying your external drives need external power supply?
 
nRiTeCh said:
It means your psu isn't supplying pure voltage on the power rails.
What PSU you using?
I have hdds as old as 15yrs going strong in my pc right now running regularly. In fact old era hdds are much much reliable having minute failure rates compared to todays drives.
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Ant Esports VS600L. I know, I know, Horrific PSU and I should've gone with a reputable brand, but when I bought it I thought it being rated for 600W, should be able to handle around 150-200W loads easily without a unscheduled rapid disassembly. And this system wasn't meant to run 24x7 anyways, it maybe came online once a week for everyone to backup their data, for maybe a day.

However, just to reiterate, this is the only internal HDD which failed in this specific system. Other 2 were externals and completely unrelated to this system. The question was asked as a general question towards HDDs.

lockhrt999 said:
So? the 5V distributed by the USB comes from SMPS too.

Or are you saying your external drives need external power supply?
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Not connected to this system ever. The HDD failures are completely unrelated to each other, please do not try to find connections between them. Each of the failures were years apart. Point being, every drive failed within 2-3 years of it being in use.
 
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