High seek error rate (13.5K/hour) - time to replace HDD?

Reizla

Pretty sure this is one @Quizzical can answer, but all input is welcome ;-)



Above is the test of my Seagate ST3250820AS (7200rpm Baracuda), which is my boot drive (no SSD for me - no speed junkie). This drive came from an old HP/Compaq machine that I purchased back in 2007 and has always worked flawlessly. But recently (now after 48K hours or 5 1/2 years of operation) I noticed the drive to become somewhat slower than I'm used to. This has been going on for about the last half year.

Today I booted PartedMagic and took a look at the drive and noticed that extreme high seek error rate (over/under shooting sectors). While the HDD still has'nd had any failures (disregard the temperature since the 59C is still within operational limits - max 65C), I'm wondering if that high seek error rate might be the one giving problems. Calculating it back, it's around 13.5K errors an hour (3 3/4 a second) and I think it's an enormous number but have no clue what's 'normal' for a HDD this old. I also have 2 WDC drives in my PC and those are still have 0 seek errors, while they have ran for roughly 20K and 14K hours.

Vrika

High seek error rate doesn't necessarily mean the drive would fail. It affects your performance, but it doesn't cause any errors to the data and everything will work as long as the seeking mechanism doesn't fail completely.

You should't keep any valuable data on that disk without backups, but you should be still fine to use it if you want to.


With that said, it looks like it's a 250GB hard disk. Replacing it with a new 1 TB hard disk would cost only $50, and quadruple the storage capacity. If you're in any doubt, replacing it would be a good investment. Now might even be a good time to get SSD hard disk instead. 

StellaBella

I think your hard drive is not even worth the time it took you to make this post. Be prepared to lose everything on your drive.

Ozmodan

I was at Microcenter yesterday and they had 1 TB Seagate drives for $40.  Replace the drive!  

I also agree with DMKano, you would be amazed how fast your computer boots and how improved your gaming is with SSD.   Personally I have a SSD for booting and my active games, everything is on the hard drive.

Quizzical

You shouldn't count on a 10 year old hard drive being reliable.  That doesn't mean you can't still use it, but its usage should be relegated to things where a sudden failure merits a shrug, not a "oh no my data is gone!"  Or even a "it will take a few hours of reloading things to recover".  Personally, I'd just buy something new and retire the drive.  Of course, personally, I haven't used hard drives as anything besides backup since 2009.

Ridelynn

Yes, time to replace it.

Reizla

Thanks all for input & thoughts. I'll be decommissioning the drive coming week (FFXIV SB starts in a few hours).

@DMKano - Not gonna replace it with a SSD. This PC I'm using now is proly my fore last one and I wont be investing money in it for new parts. With my next PC I'll certainly use SSD drive(s).
@Vrika & @Ozmodan - NOt replacing the HDD. I've said I also have a 2Tb and 1Tb in my PC and I'll just repartition those to make room for a boot partition (long live PartedMagic!).
To all 3, about speed you're right. I just replaced my PS4 HDD with a 2Tb SSHD and played Destiny with my brother. Where normally we'd enter an area almost at the same time, now I had to wait 10-15 seconds for my brother to pop in. Gotta say though that I was already playing in that area before my brother joined.

@Quizzical - Nothing valuable in data is stored on that old HDD. It's my bootdrive and because of it's small size I've moved most other data (../My Documents and other storage directories) to my E:/ drive. Only thing still there are the mail data (I use Thinnderbird, so MozBackup has been my friend for ages already) and browsers data (mainly bookmarked sited, which I also backup frequently). Windows can be installed clean again and would not be such a pain ;-)

Quizzical

Maybe you don't think so, but I sure think that "and now you must reinstall Windows to continue" because your hard drive died at a highly inconvenient time is quite a nuisance.  Doing a clean install of Windows on a new SSD at a time of your own choosing is far less of a nuisance.

Ridelynn

I don't necessarily fault your thinking.

But

As easy to use as PartedMagic may be, I'd still just go throw a few dollars at a 120G SSD for boot drive and not have to fool with it at all. As cheap as those are any more, for me, that's totally worth time and effort and risk involved in repartitioning and moving a bunch of data around on some existing drives, even before looking at any performance benefit.

For me - that's totally worth it, ~especially~ in older PCs. And if/when you do build that new PC, you can always take it with you.