Less than two months ago, my 4TB HDD from Transcend died after being used for only 3 years. It’d never been dropped or anything but I used it as a main storage for my stuff, since I learned to never keep anything in the laptop itself except the programs. There was no backup and I tried to restore the data but unfortunately I’m not even able to know what’s its problem using CrystalDiskInfo or Windows’ CHKDSK command (there’s no abnormal sound but it never gets recognized when plugged in). So, I learned the importance of backup, storage device health, encryption and that kind of stuff the hard way.
I was having another HDD, so I used it as a main replacement (it’s one year old) and bought two brand-new 5TB HDDs (one from Seagate while the other from WD). I used the WD My Passport as a backup but while it was being encrypted by VeraCrypt and reaching 80%, i got an error message saying it’s damaged, ‘heart beating’ sound appeared on top of the normal spinning sound and I couldn’t access it.
Now after being formatted, it turned out it had pending (bad) sectors and in less than 24 hours, the number went from 8 to 75! I bought another new WD 5TB HDD to replace this one (just to secure my data [I’m paranoid now 😔💔] and buying a new one is cheaper than sending the dysfunctional drive to WD, I’m not from the US). This whole experience is daunting and losing time, money and data is not fun.
My question is why are the storage devices this way, and why do devices fail constantly and we have to replace them every other year? I’m not a conspiracy theorist but is the storage devices production industry a scam, to profit and keep us hooked (much like how smartphone companies want you to buy a new phone every years)?
I’ve no problem buying new storage every 10 years but things fail in less than 3 years? That’s insane.
This is why we tell people to have one working copy backed up to two separate backup drives (ideally in two places), and a cloud backup too.
Easily can have two drives fail.
Now, if it happened all the time, manufacturer warranties would be 3-6 months and drive makers would say “you’d better buy ten and have nine backups!”
Because… the alternative is to print everything out on paper.
Yes, I got that WD drive just on October 6th, and only used it as a backup. It failed while being encrypted.
Encryption doesn’t have a major drive impact. The data is effectively the same.
Now, if you set a drive to maximum encryption, and encrypt all sectors - that’s basically going to force the drive to write to every sector. This will uncover any drive surface errors, and it’s basically the most stress test-y thing you can do to a drive. If there are bad sectors, you can bet pending reallocated sectors will go up.
Again, that does not mean the drive has failed. Those bad sectors could have been there since the factory. 75 is a concern. But is not a failure.
The fail alert is that you need to zero/erase all sectors, which will allow the drive to do a reallocation. When an erase bit is sent to the sector (by the OS/erase command), that’s when it will reallocate.