Post by mslo79 on Nov 26, 2017 1:37:45 GMT
Nov 25, 2017 2:21:03 GMT Utpe said:
Thanks for the link.I recently started having problems with my secondary Western Digital 4TB hard drive. A few of the sectors went bad, so I had to submit an Advanced RMA on their website in order to replace it since it's still underneath the 5-year warranty. I have a bunch of personal information on it, and I don't think a simple format would have sufficed seeing as how they have tools for data recovery.
I just have to remind myself to disconnect my main drive before I nuke the other one. Hopefully it does the trick.
basically...
-quick format (which only takes seconds) = does not truly erase data (people like this simply because it's quick)
-full format (takes hours) = overwrites the drive with 0's from what i have heard on more recent versions of Windows and checks the drive for bad blocks etc. so if that's true... that should give you some level of security.
basically when you get a new hard drive it's always a good idea to do a full format before using it. i think it took about 6 hours to full format my 5TB drive.
but with DBAN you can be pretty damn sure the data will never be recovered.
also, you must have gotten more of a premium drive for a 5 year warranty as normally hard drive warranties are typically 2-3 years.
I bought a HGST 5TB not all that long ago because according to backblaze, HGST hard drives have the lowest failure rates... gigaom.com/2015/01/21/hgst-still-makes-most-reliable-hard-drives-says-backblaze/ ; but i noticed with HGST drives you tend to pay a $ premium for them.
also, i would check your SATA cable to make sure that's working (sometimes these can go bad and make you think your drive etc is failing) as a while ago a SATA cabled failed which i initially though my PCI-E controller card was going bad but it was simply a faulty SATA cable as once i changed both SATA cables connected to it(it's more likely only one was bad but i did not want to spend the time messing with it and just replaced both as they are cheap enough(i bought 15-16 SATA cables for $12 on Ebay recently)), everything works perfect ever since. basically prior to changing the cable it would cause the computer to hang/freeze etc randomly and fairly recently it was getting to a point it would stop my computer from booting and once i removed both the SATA cables from the controller card the PC booted up fine. all i got connected to that PCI-E controller card is two SATA DVD burners and a old IDE CD-RW drive. so basically instead of having just 4 SATA ports on my motherboard i got a total of 6 SATA ports now along with one of the old IDE style.
side note: my older 400GB Seagate seems to be questionable to but i wonder if it's partially because of a faulty SATA cable as i might have had that drive on that controller card with the bad SATA cable at one point. but ill just keep an eye on it and i only have it as a external hard drive now.