Hi all.
So sometime last year 2 of my 3 seagate 3tb drives died within 2 weeks of each other.
So given the already poor reputation of these drives and my luck i pulled the third drive and put in on a shelf.
These were not configured in a raid and have just one partition, all drives were GPT, NTFS.
I've since then bought a new 4TB drive and copied the data from the third working drive and have a spare 3tb to attempt recovery of one of the drives.
Drive number 1 was my Media disk, this disk died shortly after the HTPC it was in was transported for a cabin trip.
The drive suddenly had really slow copy speeds when i got home. And after a reboot 98% of my files were not visible in windows explorer. Drive was unplugged and put on a shelf since i did not have any space to attempt recovery to.
This is the least important drive which has no data of great personal value to me.
Drive number 2 was a drive in my gaming rig which has a lot of data i cannot replace.
The drive suddenly one day showed up as a raw volume in windows. Drive was pulled like the other and put on a shelf.
I've learnt a very valuable lesson about backups and redundancy and wont be storing valuable data on a single drive anymore. But how do i even begin to attack this? IBAS (kroll ontrack) has a HQ near me and I've done some work with them trough my job. But 1000$ professional data recovery is not really in my budget. The data is not extremely important but is very dear to me.
I've done some research and come across stuff tools like ddrescue and Zero Assumption Recovery but i want to at least attack drive number 2 the "right way" None of the drives makes any clicking or scraping sounds.
Any advice that will stop me just doing more damage?
Those drives are so bad that software-based recovery tools will not work.
The only way is to have them opened up and parts swapped out (the circuit board as well as the heads, IIRC).
Leave it to the experts, the tolerances are so small that you'll never manage to do that without precision tools and a perfectly dust-free lab. If the $1000 is not in your budget right now, I'd suggest saving up until it is within your budget. In the mean time, don't plug in that drive because you'll only make things worse. Don't even try to clone it yourself.
"How to attack two defective seagate 3tb drives"
With a large, blunt object....preferably a sledgehammer.
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DANG... either you have terrible luck or you don't do research before buying drives.
I have already taken the decision that I'm going to attempt to recover the data myself. As I am pretty sure this is not a mechanical failure and I'd rather lose all my data and learn a few new tricks along the way then spend that kind of money.
I also found this after posting lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddrPnuvFV6E
Nah, these are the drives made during the HDD shortage after the Thailand floodings. Back then the 3TB Seagates were basically the only ones available.
After a while they started dying at an alarming rate. @wendell reported a 33% annual failure rate, as did Backblaze.
46:55 to 50:00 is about those famous drives.
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I have a seagate 3TB drive I pulled from an external enclosure, it lasted a while and after trading my desktop PC for a laptop, the new owner basically just let the drive hang in the case unmounted, and it contiued to work for a good number of months, when I saw the drive hanging I had to fix it and screw it in place, but that basically destroyed the firmware on the drive and it starting failing any long writes to it.
moral of the story, shit happens.
I knew about the data center statistic by the time i bought the third drive i think but i have some seagate drives with 5000+ hours power on time