Hard Drive failing
September 23, 2024 5:03 PM Subscribe
My WD Black portable HDD is making some beeping noises, which I understand is a sign that it is about to fail. (It's not actually beeping, but making a noise that sounds like beeping.) It is still working fine. It is still in the 3 yr warranty period, but it has not actually failed yet, so I don't think I can send it in. What should I do?
Response by poster: I've done that, but is there anything I can do to get the drive refunded or replaced?
posted by roaring beast at 5:13 PM on September 23
posted by roaring beast at 5:13 PM on September 23
Have something turning it on, writing stuff, then turning it back off every minute will probably cause it to die quicker so you can warranty it. Not sure how you do that easily tho.
posted by flimflam at 5:38 PM on September 23
posted by flimflam at 5:38 PM on September 23
Hard drives have diagnostics built in called SMART. If it's beeping it may already be in a SMART fail state, and that should be enough for WD to replace the drive.
The drive needs to be hooked up and running for these instructions to work.
On Windows: Run CrystalDiskInfo (made by the CrystalDiskMark people - the website is pretty weird and somewhat NSFW, just as a warning, that is their real website) or HWInfo64 (which has a much less weird, not NSFW website) and you should be able to use either to see the SMART status of the drive.
HWInfo64 will tell you a ton more stuff about your machine and is more of a power user tool so it'll require some hunting to find the data, but in the main window it should be under <your computer name> then under Drives somewhere.
On macOS: Run System Information - Apple Menu, then System Settings, then General, then About, and you should have a button for System Report at the bottom. The data you're after is in the Storage section. It will say "SMART Status: Verified" if it's OK or something else if it isn't.
WD may want something specific but if they do they will provide guidance for that. It's been a long time since I had to warranty out a drive to them specifically (Maxtor was still around!) but SMART status alone was good enough at the time - the tolerances for SMART are usually so loose that the drive has to be way out of marginal to trip it.
(Which leads me to the another thing: just warranty it anyway saying it's making weird noises. That alone may be enough. Weird noises are bad.)
posted by mrg at 6:19 PM on September 23 [3 favorites]
The drive needs to be hooked up and running for these instructions to work.
On Windows: Run CrystalDiskInfo (made by the CrystalDiskMark people - the website is pretty weird and somewhat NSFW, just as a warning, that is their real website) or HWInfo64 (which has a much less weird, not NSFW website) and you should be able to use either to see the SMART status of the drive.
HWInfo64 will tell you a ton more stuff about your machine and is more of a power user tool so it'll require some hunting to find the data, but in the main window it should be under <your computer name> then under Drives somewhere.
On macOS: Run System Information - Apple Menu, then System Settings, then General, then About, and you should have a button for System Report at the bottom. The data you're after is in the Storage section. It will say "SMART Status: Verified" if it's OK or something else if it isn't.
WD may want something specific but if they do they will provide guidance for that. It's been a long time since I had to warranty out a drive to them specifically (Maxtor was still around!) but SMART status alone was good enough at the time - the tolerances for SMART are usually so loose that the drive has to be way out of marginal to trip it.
(Which leads me to the another thing: just warranty it anyway saying it's making weird noises. That alone may be enough. Weird noises are bad.)
posted by mrg at 6:19 PM on September 23 [3 favorites]
Response by poster: Here's what HWInfo gives me - https://imgur.com/a/Pzhl2lK
Am I looking for something in particular?
posted by roaring beast at 6:50 PM on September 23
Am I looking for something in particular?
posted by roaring beast at 6:50 PM on September 23
Red Xes - the raw data it gives you is challenging to interpret at best but HWInfo should flag anything that falls out of spec with a red X or a yellow thing rather than the green checkmark. If they're all green then it's probably not hit an error bad enough for SMART to fail. (If you want more info on the raw numbers that are there, there's a pretty good overview here. I'm not sure how to get the raw numbers out of HWInfo64 - I don't have any spinning disks to hand anymore and SSDs have very different reporting.)
It is entirely possible that the drive is failing but not enough for SMART to trip, though - a SMART failure is sort of an obvious "a thing is wrong" for WD to act on but it can take a lot for a drive to actually generate a reportable error.
posted by mrg at 7:16 PM on September 23
It is entirely possible that the drive is failing but not enough for SMART to trip, though - a SMART failure is sort of an obvious "a thing is wrong" for WD to act on but it can take a lot for a drive to actually generate a reportable error.
posted by mrg at 7:16 PM on September 23
"Calibration Retry Rate" and "Write/Multi-Zone Error Rate" suggest that the mechanism above the spinning platters is having trouble, will likely fail soon.
Start the RMA process at WD's web site.
posted by k3ninho at 12:12 AM on September 24
Start the RMA process at WD's web site.
posted by k3ninho at 12:12 AM on September 24
On Windows, the diagnostic tool I always use for reading SMART info is PassMark DiskCheckup, and the numbers I pay attention to are the raw results for Reallocated Sector Count, Reallocated Event Count , Current Pending Sector Count and Off-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count (though it's rare to see anything wrong with that last one because most people don't bother ever running SMART offline tests).
The most important raw counts are Reallocated Sector Count, which is how many blocks the drive has had to put somewhere else after seeing an error detection and correction failure in their original location, and Current Pending Sector Count, which is the number of disk blocks that the drive needs to move elsewhere but can't because it has no clean source of data for them.
The sum of those two raw numbers is a good indication of the number of defects that have grown on the disk surfaces since the drive was first sold. I will always image and replace any drive for which that sum is more than a few tens or bigger a week later, because once defects start to appear they usually do so increasingly quickly.
The numbers shown in your HWInfo screen shot are all "cooked" SMART scores rather than the raw counts that are more useful for these specific items. Cooking offsets and scales each raw count into a range between 0 and 255 and associates it with a threshold score below which the cooked score would indicate failure; it also remembers the worst cooked score seen to date. I'm a lot less optimistic than most disk drive manufacturers seem to be about the future of drives that have started showing signs of stress, so I don't pay much attention to the cooked scores.
If the noise you describe as "beeping" is intermittent, it's probably the sound of the head homing and seek retry process that the drive will go through while attempting to recover a clean copy of some disk block it needs to reallocate. If those noises are accompanied by noticeable data retrieval delays, or if the drive is becoming in general much slower than you'd expect it to, that's a clear sign of imminent failure.
If the beep is more of a continuous whine or whistle, there will be an issue with the main spindle bearings most likely caused by physical shock or a manufacturing defect.
The first response to any kind of unexpected noise or marked slowdown should be to make a backup of the suspicious drive your first priority, which you've done and for which you deserve congratulations. Alarming numbers of people just rely on hope at that point, like turning up the car radio to cover the grinding noises from the engine, and it's almost never fulfilled.
posted by flabdablet at 5:07 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]
The most important raw counts are Reallocated Sector Count, which is how many blocks the drive has had to put somewhere else after seeing an error detection and correction failure in their original location, and Current Pending Sector Count, which is the number of disk blocks that the drive needs to move elsewhere but can't because it has no clean source of data for them.
The sum of those two raw numbers is a good indication of the number of defects that have grown on the disk surfaces since the drive was first sold. I will always image and replace any drive for which that sum is more than a few tens or bigger a week later, because once defects start to appear they usually do so increasingly quickly.
The numbers shown in your HWInfo screen shot are all "cooked" SMART scores rather than the raw counts that are more useful for these specific items. Cooking offsets and scales each raw count into a range between 0 and 255 and associates it with a threshold score below which the cooked score would indicate failure; it also remembers the worst cooked score seen to date. I'm a lot less optimistic than most disk drive manufacturers seem to be about the future of drives that have started showing signs of stress, so I don't pay much attention to the cooked scores.
If the noise you describe as "beeping" is intermittent, it's probably the sound of the head homing and seek retry process that the drive will go through while attempting to recover a clean copy of some disk block it needs to reallocate. If those noises are accompanied by noticeable data retrieval delays, or if the drive is becoming in general much slower than you'd expect it to, that's a clear sign of imminent failure.
If the beep is more of a continuous whine or whistle, there will be an issue with the main spindle bearings most likely caused by physical shock or a manufacturing defect.
The first response to any kind of unexpected noise or marked slowdown should be to make a backup of the suspicious drive your first priority, which you've done and for which you deserve congratulations. Alarming numbers of people just rely on hope at that point, like turning up the car radio to cover the grinding noises from the engine, and it's almost never fulfilled.
posted by flabdablet at 5:07 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]
one of the things i used to like about hard drives was if there were weird sounds it would be like a warning that something was wrong with it or would go wrong very soon. an ssd dies suddenly and silently.
posted by toycamera at 11:50 AM on September 24
posted by toycamera at 11:50 AM on September 24
Have you reached out to WD Customer Support yet?
If nothing else it should put a stake in the ground on when things started going wrong. They’ll probably on walk you through some diagnostics as well.
posted by bitdamaged at 3:59 PM on September 25 [1 favorite]
If nothing else it should put a stake in the ground on when things started going wrong. They’ll probably on walk you through some diagnostics as well.
posted by bitdamaged at 3:59 PM on September 25 [1 favorite]
« Older ISO Books/Podcasts About Bad Leadership in... | How are online stores shipping for so cheap? Newer »
You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments
posted by jonathanhughes at 5:09 PM on September 23 [3 favorites]