My 6TB hard drive failed, any ideas?

In Device Manager, find the Seagate drive, right click and open the Properties window, click on Policies and select Better Performance and check Enable Write Caching.

 

I am sorryfor your situation. Once you have resolved it, I hope you do, may I make a suggestion?

In future perhaps use a NAS drive that has a minimum of 2 drive bays. Then you can set it up so that the drive 1 is mirrored by drive 2. This way if and when any either of the drives fail, you just swap it over for another.
The NAS will handle the data build.

Also the NAS will generate disc health reports at a frequency you specify.

I do this with a Synology 2 bay drive, which is then backed up twice on two different external drives.
The reason for the extra backups is to provide a safety net if the Synology suffers a failure that is not drive related, perhaps the PSU.
If this did happen then I would buy an empty Synology NAS and just put the 2 drives in there, but the external back ups would serve while I replace the Synology NAS.

There are many makes of NAS that would serve you well like this, not just Synology.

I am sorry I can’t offer any suggestions to resolve your current issue, but there have been some very good suggestions in the thread.

 

Keep calm, back up and use FreeNAS locally, when you get your data back.

 

First of all, so sorry for the trouble you're experiencing.

I've never had this problem (and I also own some 14-16 y.o. Maxtor units that still work perfectly) but if I'm allowed to offer a humble advice, hard drives larger than 2TB should be avoided, for the simple reason that there's less risk. One thing is 2TB lost, another one is 6TB. Hard drives are cheap today...basically every Hard drive of mine has two clones, and very important data are on two DVD-Rs too.
I hear "Oh, no; I lost everything" stories all the time.

As for data recovering, if you hear the clicking sound, I wouldn't risk a DIY home solution. There are tutorials on the net, but since you spent a lot of money to download all that audio stuff, better ask a pro to avoid further damage.

Good luck, hope you can recover everything

 

The WD 8 TB at Best Buy is currently on sale for $139.99

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-eas...-3-0-hard-drive-black/5792401.p?skuId=5792401

 

Came a cross this a few days ago;

Backblaze Drive Stats: 2018 Hard Drive Failure Rates

I've always stuck with Toshiba for my own storage.


Never had much luck with Seagate or Western Digital consumer drives... although their Enterprise grade drives tend to be tough as old boots.

 

All this talk about drive speed has me wondering how I check the drive speed of all my external drives.

I’m on older Mac Pro 5.1 and I have lots of photos and music on various drives. Trying to consolidate with my 4 internal drives and both my work I and backup of my external drives. Thanks.

 

By part number on the drive (google), if it isn't on the label itself.

 

Unless you're doing something very demanding, it's not really a concern. 5400rpm is plenty for most tasks...definitely for music, photos, etc.

Good eye! They were $200 just yesterday.

 

I just have to point out, again, every time I see it posted, that the Backblaze charts are misleading and worthless as a guide to hard drive reliability by brand or specific model.. They do not know anything about statistics. Those charts have some meaning for their business (but they don't understand anyway), but not as a guide to hard drive reliability by brand or specific model.

 

I've had internal and external drives fail before. Right now I need to buy a couple new ones but this holiday season leaches everything from the paycheck. I suppose I should go from 3tb to 4tb in case Mazzy asks me to be in this backup club.

The freezer trick works. I had a drive fail last year and even eight hours in the freezer would get up up and spinning for 20 minutes. I'd move some files off it and then when it started to hiccup, back to the freezer. It took about a week but I got everything off that drive.

 

I figure this is as good a thread to ask as any. I just picked up three more of the EasyStore drives...I have a problem, lol. I'll be running four total internally, but I'm now up to five external backup drives. This is too dang many enclosures. Can anyone recommend a dependable, well cooled 5-6 bay enclosure? I don't need any fancy RAID or even NAS capability. JBOD and USB 3.0 is plenty for my needs. The Synology stuff gets the best reviews, but is like $750 for the one I'd want, and that's just too much.

 

There are things like this, 5 bays
Kingwin KF-52-BK Internal Hard Drive Backplane Enclosure 5 Hot Swap Bay Mobile Rack For 3.5? HDD - Newegg.com
And, your local independent computer chop shop probably has this or something similar or can build something similar. This is not a recommendation, I don't have this. I had a similar two bay thing which was fine but obsolete now.

 

That's what I do also. I have 3TB of music and have 3 externals that have my complete collection on each of them. I then have 4 externals that have most of my collection on them. I also have 4 friends that have copies. I'm due to buy another external early next year and do another backup. All the drives I have bought have been Seagate or Western Digital. I just buy whatever is on sale when I need one.

The first external I bought was 500 GB and I filled it up with music quickly. Not long afterwards I dropped the thing on the floor, a hard tiled floor and thought it was done. I plugged it in and was surprised to see it still worked, though it made an incredibly loud noise. I back it up right away. Every once in a while I plug it in and just open a few folders and listen to the noise it makes. It gets so loud you wonder if they thing could explode and sent pieces everywhere. Ha!

 

I'm going to order some more drives, this just happened too fast .

 

Thanks, but I found my solution on the cheap. Ordered a SAS controller and a four bay fanned hard drive cage that fits into three open optical bays on my PC case. I'm pretty sure the thing you linked is just a SAS HDD cage anyhow, not a USB interface. That'll be a total of 10 internal HDDs and 72TB, plus one external 4TB. 36TB primary storage, 36TB backup, and 4TB for my Plex DVR/temporary storage. Probably overkill, but I think I'm good for a while my 20TB primary got more than half full quicker than I thought, so I figure I may as well get some cushion while those drives were on sale.

 

I would not rely on drive mirroring in a NAS setup as a backup. In automatic mirroring if a file becomes corrupted in one it could easily end up corrupted in both.
In my experience, a backup is a separate drive that is backed up on some type of schedule then disconnected and stored. I prefer to keep two backups, one on site and one off site. Some people think that is a minimum level of backups.

At this point in my life, if I lost all my files I'd be done with the hobby. It would be catastrophic.

 

I still find the Backblaze charts interesting (probably for different reasons). But sure, they should be taken with a pinch of salt in the grand scheme of things... there are of course many variables why they may fail within their environment.

My curiosity gets the better of me wondering what the actual faults are with some of those Seagate drives (1,000+ failures on some models). I wonder if they share a common fault (software, mechanical, power, ic design, parts quality etc)?

 

Just picked up two at the local Best Buy. Checked the bottom of the box for Country of Origin - they're both made in Thailand. From what I understand, the ones marked "Product of Thailand" have 256 MB Cache and the ones made in China have only 128 MB Cache.

(Thank you DyersEve726 for the heads up!)

 

A friend recovered data after mine failed, God knows how much it would've cost otherwise, the drive wasn't functioning after though.

 

Mine have all been white label WD80EMAZ so far. I still have two more unopened, but I'm willing to bet they're the same. I got my hard drive cage yesterday. It's pretty rockin! Just waiting on my SAS controller and I'll officially have ten hard drives (and an SSD) in this box, lol. Glad I went with a giant case when I built this computer like six years ago.

 

I ordered 2 and they are also from Thailand. They worked well so I ordered 2 more. I've been meaning to get my backup better organized this should do it for me.

 

Or the controller inside the external case. Anyway, I had the same thing. Opened up the case and took out the drive. No problems since.

 

This is why my important data is on a RAID.

Backups are essential of course, but I'd hate to be several hours into a project and lose everything because a drive prematurely died. (I've seen it happen, not pretty.)

 

WD doesn't make green drives anymore, but they still mae der drives, which aren't recommended for average storage. When they die, they die dead.