Drive Failure - Need Help

While I was doing my back up from my last photo shoot, my main Photos (3TB) drive appears to have failed. Fortunately, I do not appear to have lost much other than a few of the moth images I had taken two nights ago. 

Basically the drive was working fine, but during the backup, the windows estimated time window just froze. Now when I boot up my machine that one drive will not show up. I have tried plugging different SATA cables into it from different SATA ports, but it just will not show up. I suspect it is toast and will purchase a new drive ASAP

What are some current options for me to try to recover some files from this drive? Are there any other things I can try to see if I can get the drive to show up and get the files off it? Any other ideas are greatly appreciated.

If I buy a new 4TB or 6TB drive, which one would you recommend the most?

I had a 3TB external fail. Wouldn't show up after restarts etc. I took it to Memory Express and was told I could possibly save it with a new enclosure which I think was $35-40. It's easy to remove the actual hard drive from the old enclosure and pop it into a new one. It's still working and I use it to back up another drive with the same files now. But if your hard drive itself is toast, it's a bigger problem. In terms of a new one, I've been using Seagates with no problems so far.

The is not an external drive in an enclosure, this is an internal drive in my desktop case. How do I determine if the drive is toast? I can't get it to run or get recognized.

I am way behind the times now with PC parts and hard drives. Can I use a NAS drive like these ones in a regular PC system?

https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.a ... 2235064CVF

https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.a ... 6822234345

Most of the 4TB and up drives are only 5400 RPM. I used to use 7200 RPM drives. Will this make much of a difference for my main drive where I store and work on my photos, or should I definitely get a 7200 RPM drive?

Tim Zurowski wrote:The is not an external drive in an enclosure, this is an internal drive in my desktop case. How do I determine if the drive is toast? I can't get it to run or get recognized.

I am way behind the times now with PC parts and hard drives. Can I use a NAS drive like these ones in a regular PC system?

https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.a ... 2235064CVF

https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.a ... 6822234345

Most of the 4TB and up drives are only 5400 RPM. I used to use 7200 RPM drives. Will this make much of a difference for my main drive where I store and work on my photos, or should I definitely get a 7200 RPM drive?

Tim, if you're set on size/WD you should narrow it down to one of the black series of drives. Supposedly better quality and they are 7200 speed drives. Don't understand why you you narrowed it down to a NAS drive if you're on a stand alone machine. 

Thanks Don. I did not narrow it down to NAS drives. I have no idea what the differences are between the NAS, purple, red, black, gold, etc. drives are? Will they all work for my needs? I just posted those NAS wondering if they would work on a regular system like mine. Doing some searches, the Seagates almost always get the highest rating in the 7200 RPM drives. What I am going to do is order one WD Black 4TB 7200 RPM and one Seagate 4TB 5900 RPM for a backup drive, as well as a 4TB secondary backup external drive. I still have two other 3TB drives for backup as well.

By unplugging all the drives and then plugging them all back in, I was able to get Windows to recognize the drive again, but it is acting very odd and very sluggish. It took me a long time, but I managed to get everything backed up that I hadn't had time to do in the past few days.

I am not necessarily "set on size" I just need more than my existing 3TB drives, and also have to consider cost, which is a factor. The 6TB's are getting a bit too costly for three drives.

You could try Hard Disk Sentinel https://www.hdsentinel.com
I think they have demo version. It'll tell you if drive has any issues. If it's not recognized by Sentinel then drive board is probably toast.

Thanks very much for the suggestion Andrew. I am pretty sure this drive is toast and have taken it out of my system, so no way to test it now. Even though it was a secondary drive (i.e. not the OS drive which is an SSD) it was slowing down my whole system. With the drive gone, everything is back up to normal speed now. I have no trust in this drive now and do not want it back in the box. I believe now that this drive has been failing for awhile, which was the cause of a lot of my slow PC issues. I finally got the drive recognized by Windows yesterday and it took over 4 hours to copy just 128 GB of data to another internal drive (which should normally take minutes). Bridge was also taking up to 20 minutes to load the thumbs in large folders, which would normally take less than one minute with a healthy drive. Fortunately the drive allowed me to the transfer the files and didn't completely fail.

So without anyone responding to the drive questions, and being in need to get a replacement quickly, I ordered a 7200 RPM 4TB Seagate for the main Photo drive, a Western Digital Blue 5400 RPM 4TB backup drive and a Seagate 4TB USB 3 external drive. Just those three drives alone cost me $551! I did not go for the Western Digital Black 4 TB drive because the rating for it was 2 stars out of 5 and it apparently has a high failure rate.

As for recovery, other than paying a thousand plus dollars, try this - it's a one time shot that might work:
Partially fill a zip-lock baggie with rice. Lay the whole thing flat and then insert a paper towel on top of the rice. Now place the drive on top of that and completely seal the bag. Wait a couple of hours. Now carefully place the while thing in a freezer for 12 hours. After tha immediately plug the drive in, fire up the computer and if the drive is recognized, waste no time in getting the files off of it.

It's a long shot but does work sometimes.

OK, looks like you got the data bak - good!

As for the drives, I'd immediately return the 5400 RPM drives and get 7200 RPM ones. You pretty much get what you pay for as far as performance and reliability is concerned. There's a reason an Enterprise class drive costs 2 to 3 times what a standard 7200RPM drive costs. There's a reason a 5400 RPM drive is cheap. It's slow, and it isn't made with anywhere near the level of components of a 7200 drive or even more an Enterprise drive.

Thanks EJ. Wish I had known that before I ordered them. I will probably be okay with the 5400 RPM as my third backup drive since it will never get used other than transferring files for backup. The problem for me is cost, and the 7200 drives would have cost significantly more. So I figured I would get one decent 7200 for my main working photo drive and the others are just for backups.

As long as you don't care about performance then you will probably be OK. Make sure that the drive is well cooled and ventilated. If this is internal to your machine and there is a way to mount it where there is an empty drive slot between this and the system drive and also keep it away from the graphics card as much as possible. Also, while you have the system open, clean out the insides, make sure that all vents are clear of dirt and make sure the fans in the system are clean. Blowing out all of the dust will help with cooling.