HDD worked flawlessly so far, it’s an old hdd from like 2014, crystal disk info and hdd sentinel both showed good health.
Then a couple days ago pc started behaving weirdly, it didn’t recognize my 2nd ssd that was bought about a month ago, then after a couple reboots it recognized all drives just fine, then today I had a couple of boot sequences where a part of the os didn’t even initialize or something, icons were missing, tabs in the browser were missing, crystal disk info couldn’t even load, showed something like “software doesn’t fit your system”.
Then after another couple reboots and fiddling with sata connectors and power connectors inside the case, making sure all is plugged in well, system starts normally again, but the videogame I played just yesterday won’t load (it’s on that HDD). Opened crystal disk and sentinel again, both show that HDD went from 100% to 80% in one day and acquired a number of bad sectors (says 8). HDD sentinel graphs show rapid decline in one day.
How come a perfectly good drive just goes bad like that in a day?
If the number of bad sectors is a multiple of 8, the software is probably counting logical sectors of 512 bytes each, while the disk has physical sectors of 4096 bytes each. Each time a physical sector fails, the software counts it eight times.
Still worth replacing the disk – a functional disk shouldn’t have any bad sectors.
HDD media are spinning disks with a magnetizable coating. The coating is relatively thick compared to how close the read heads are to the media, so if pieces of the coating come loose, the heads tend to run into them and spread them around, causing even more damage.
Using the drive will cause it to fail sooner and will continue to damage the files on the drive.
Does it just happen out of the blue that often? I have an external hdd that’s like from 2011 and it still holds all the data I put in back then. I don’t assume all drives should work like that, but still, I expected the older one to die much sooner than the other one.
HDDs fail this way, yes. Once one sector goes bad it can spread very quickly.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you have corrupted data on that 2011 drive. You want know until you try opening a file on there.
Over the last year I opened most of the files there at least once, except for some stuff I forgot about a long time ago, but it’s maybe a gig at most in total. All seemed to work fine.