Clip: Disk Can't Write Fast Enough - is this HDD failing?

Aug 8, 2018
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31,171
Spring, Texas
I just started getting this error message in BI today. I have read the other threads but need to ask you guys if the disk is failing. None of the other threads ever gave a follow up with the outcome.

My problem: Started getting this error today for every cam on this one WD 10TB Purple drive, drive E. My system has three WD 10 TB Purple drives. Only this drive gives the errors. I have 23 cams writing to these three drives. I grew my system over the years and this drive is the first one I installed back in 2018. Never had any drives issues before.

I would just replace it but I am leaving for a three-week trip Wednesday. So there is no way I can get a replacement in time.

It is compounded with the issue that there are about 55 files that I need to keep as they are files from when my daughter died. I do not want to loose those files.

I am currently copying those files to another HDD, but it is running very slow. I shut down BI to hope to not overload the system, but things seem to have come to a standstill.

Ideas?
 
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If it is failing then you definitely want to get the important video backed up before you do much else. It may be just slow due to excessive file fragmentation too, especially if the drive is very close to full. Hard to say without running some diagnostic tools.

Western Digital has a program you can use to do diagnostic tests.

Gsmartcontrol is an alternative diagnostic tool that works with any brand of hard drive.

If those tests come back clean, I'd assume it is just fragmentation. Right click the drive in Windows, go to Properties > Tools > Optimize. Then analyze the drive to determine how much fragmentation it is dealing with. You can also defrag it from there. But know this will take a long time.
 
Got those important files copied to another disk. It took over an hour and a half for just one file. It was running about 650kb/s then would jump up to about 1.2mb/s for a few seconds then to 0kb/s and back again. All the other 53 files ran at about 35-60mb/s.

I added more headroom to each of the three drives dropping the quota to 8100GB and then ran a DB repair/regenerate. It took about 30 minutes to delete all of the over quota files. But that seems to have fixed the problem. Why this cropped up today when I have not changed the allocations in over 5 years, I do not know.
 
They sell Donor drives and/or Donor PCB's from drives on Ebay and other sites.
You match up all the build info on SN and Model # and the part# on the PCB etc..., and have them or yourself replace the circuit board with the donor drive....
I did it myself on a WD "my Book" or whatever it was called USB storage drive with a 2 or 3 TB capacity as I recall. I got it to spin up and flail around and after about 3 minutes i was able to transfer old iphone Photos and some tax .PDF's etc.... there were a few sectors that came back as unreadable and so not all the data was available. but 95% of it I could copy. I'm sure a data recovery outfit mighta got 99% but whatever.
Houston has data recovery websites locally.

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