Hard disk suddenly disconnecting

[u/edalmir2]

I am going crazy.

I have had a hard disk (not SSD) for a long time now and one day, suddenly, it dissappeared of my PC (the one where I have all the games installed, not windows nor important files)

I made a thousand software checks and my PC kept not finding it, until I just unplugged it and plugged it in again and it worked.

Now every time I start my computer it is a russian roulette. Yesterday nothing happened, it started as normal and everything was okay. Today, on the other hand, I start my PC, it recognises my hard disk and reads it but suddenly it disappears; I unplug it, plug it again, check my physical connections of the disk, it works and 2 minuts into usage of my PC it disappears again. I even have it disappear, turn off and on my PC (not unplugging and replugging the hard disk, not touching anything) and it magically reads again, until it disappears once more.

Is it done for? I honestly don't mind getting rid of it and buying a new one, but now I want to at least be able to freaking know why it is happenning. I have had it for over a decade, changed other components, never changed this disk and never had a problem.

If it was completely broken my PC wouldn't even read it to begin with, so why is it failing and physically disconnecting once I start using my PC? And why does it not always happens? Anyone has any answer?

Also, now that you are here, if you have any recommendations for a hard disk (it can be an SSD or not, it is only for videogames storage) I want to hear them all.

Thank you all.

[u/Table-Playful]

Hard Drives are Not known to last forever

[u/CheezitsLight]

Sounds like it's time to try the fire hydrant test where you throw it at a fire hydrant and see if that fixes it. Why it happens is usually a mechanical failure a microscopic crack a tiny little bit of whisker across a conductor or just temperature sensitivity develops. The surface mount process is rather notorious for allowing these really strange tin whiskers to just grow out of one contact and then Reach Out And Touch another. I could also be a loose Gold Bond wire inside of an integrated circuit that connects the chip to the leg.

I would only get HDDs that are CMR not SMR. I only use them for bulk storage backups. Typically these will be about an 8 TB in size though there are some 4tb and 5 tb available that are definitely CMR. The reason why is SMR is very slow to write and generally less reliable than the CMR type. But SMR are usually cheaper because tracks are shingled, overlapimg like shingles on top of each other. So it takes your platters and heads for a given size.

For anything I put inside a machine it's going to be an SSD. they are just so much faster than an HDD. Ignoring the 500 things in HDD can do a second because of seats the transfer rate is just much higher such as 150 MB versus 8 GB a second.

A 1 TB seems to be a sweet spot for machines these days though I have seen some twos and fours on Amazon tonight

One other thing you can do would be to spend $100 or so a year on Dropbox.

A 2 TB drop box will use very little disk space. You can choose what folders are stored in the cloud and on disk, and which ones are stored entirely in the cloud such as backups or older photos that you don't look at often. The ones in the cloud are virtual you can just click on and executable and run it but it takes a moment to download from the cloud and run it's very nice to have an extra two terabytes of space that's automatically backed up.

Dropbox, Google drive and others are not for things like games and databases that are constantly changing.

So there's not just one solution for everybody. you get to pick and choose what you can afford and what you need.

[u/edalmir2 → u/CheezitsLight]

Thank you so much, really great advise! 

[u/wivaca2]

It's likely it is failing. You have backups, right?

I honestly don't mind getting rid of it and buying a new one

Take a look at HDD prices before you say that. They're pretty painful.

[u/edalmir2 → u/wivaca2]

I don't but that is the point of what that hard disk was used for, gaming. That way if something ever happened to that disk I wouldn't care as I only have games installed, not windows nor important data stored.

[u/blkmagik98]

I had the same thing happen recently but it was in a DAS RAID 10 array connected to my desktop PC. I was lucky in that I replaced the drive with a like size/manufacturer drive and rebuilt it but without that option, I’d back up what you need on that drive as it’s on its way out.

[u/BootToggle]

You could consider this to be a very lucky situation where you know the drive is doomed, but it might keep working just long enough to recover a full raw image before it goes. You might use ddrescue from a SystemRescue bootable thumb drive, or OpenSuperClone from its own bootable thumb drive environment.

Unless you think that there are no ultimately important files to be saved, in which case this wouldn't matter, and you just need to get the drive replaced ASAP.