Hi alll.....last night I erased my iMac (Sequoia). After restart, I connected my WD external hard drive and began moving a few folders over. Worked great. The drive also worked perfectly fine on my Macbook Pro (Catalina). I used Migration Assistant to transfer some files to the iMac from the MBP. As that was finishing, iMac froze on black startup screen but wouldn't progress from there. I realized I had left the ext HD plugged in, and knowing from the past this causes issues, I unplugged it. It unfroze and finished restarting just fine. Now, the ext HD does not show up on either of my Mac's desktops, but does show up in Disk Utility, although it will not mount. Format is ExFat. I plugged it into a Windows PC and then back to my mac....no change. It does show up just fine on the PC and I can access the files successfully. Anyone have any ideas or thoughts on what changed?? I appreciate all of the help in advance!

Also wanted to add that when I click on First Aid, it immediately fails.

Almost 10k on/off cycles + 100k hours lol

Hi, I've got an LC Power PRO-925B here and was wondering if it'd be okay to use it for my home server. I'm just wondering how to insert the hard drive into the case. I think there's a way I could fit them, but I've got no way of housing them. They're also a bit too small to fit in there. Here's a link to the case: https://www.lc-power.com/en/pro-925b/

Bought these on a garage sell today for $40 all. The HGST has only 66 hours on it. The 2TB barracuda 101 hours (notice the nice rust spots lol). Time to put them to use.

Can someone describe a standard way to determine that a drive is dead and can be disposed of? I know there are drive utilities but not sure for the specific attribute (or combination of attributions) to indicate that the drive is either failing or has failed and is not safe to use anymore. Is it the same test for both mechanical HDDs and flash/solid-state drives?

Would appreciate specific steps like example commands if possible (I'm on a Linux system). The main filesystems I use are btrfs, ext4, and xfs and they are encrypted with LUKS.

Much appreciated.

https://xenospectrum.com/sandisk-ssd-9pb-endurance-test-controller-reality/

https://wccftech.com/64gb-sandisk-ssd-survives-16-year-9-petabyte-endurance-test/

https://youtu.be/HLQz_1VLy9E?si=D9Y__jRdIXDTH879

https://vgtimes.com/tech-and-hardware/165738-64gb-sandisk-ssd-survives-16-years-and-9-petabytes-of-writes.html

Basically I bought a used external seagate 8TB backup hub drive off eBay (barracuda drive) and used it every day for 12 days with hdsentinel showing no bad sectors etc also it only had a couple of days usage when I bought it according to hdsentinel smart data and suddenly it just disappeared in Windows 10 and when I restarted it and powered it up there was no clicking or chirping just the usual motor spinning and the hard briefly trying to access 🤔

I’ve have never suffered this issue in over a decade ! Can a hardrive literally just die like that 🥱

Hey reddit! looking for some help with my first home setup of a 3.5" external HDD with an enclosure.

I ordered a 16TB IronWolf Pro from Seagate (model number ST16000NT001, link). I tried running it in a Vantec NexStar HX enclosure, but it never mounted and I just heard a beeping sound. I figured it was DOA after reading some posts/forums and returned it to Seagate for a replacement.

The second drive arrived yesterday, and this time I thought maybe the Vantec enclosure (12V/2A) wasn't supplying enough power, so I tried two other setups.

First I tried a FIDECO enclosure with a 12V/2A adapter. The drive actually spun up for about a minute, but I did hear the sound breaking a couple times in the middle and then it again stopped spinning and went back to beeping. I tried a Sabrent dual-bay dock with a 12V/3A adapter too after that. I only used one bay so the drive had the power supply to itself, but still the same repeated beep, and this time I didn't hear it spin at all.

I checked that the beep is definitely coming from the drive.
EDIT: This is how it sounds https://voca.ro/13y7RLyqfgOg

The drive doesn't show up in diskutil list.

So now I've had two drives and three enclosures produce basically the same result. I honestly can't tell what the problem is anymore. Two DOA drives in a row from Seagate seems unlikely, and three enclosures failing the same way seems just as unlikely.

My setup, in case I'm missing something obvious:

• MacBook Pro (2026)
• Anker USB-C to USB 3.0 adapter for data
• Dock/enclosure connected to its own power brick and plugged directly into the wall

A few things I'm wondering:

• Does beeping always mean a mechanical problem? Most things I've found say it's the spindle motor failing to start, which would mean the drive is physically bad. But two drives in a row?
• Is it possible one of these enclosures damaged the drives, or is that not really a thing?
• Are bare/OEM drives commonly damaged during shipping? I've seen UPS isn't exactly gentle when they were loading the packages off..
• Is there anything else safe to test before I send this one back too?

I'm in the US. Happy to try whatever people suggest, but I don't want to keep power-cycling the drive if that might make things worse.
If nothing works, I'll just get the regular hard disk which isn't ideal since I need it running 24x7.
At my wits end right now, so any and all help appreciated, thanks!!

Enclosures tested:

• Vantec NexStar HX
• FIDECO enclosure (12V/2A)
• Sabrent dual-bay dock (12V/3A)

For the last two years or so my drive sometimes disappears from file explorer at random. Most of the time it results in a complete freeze of the whole system if any of the apps currently in use are installed on this particular drive. Back then it was pretty rare and after a few reboots it would either appear as uninitialized in disk management or work with no more issues. The intermittency led me to believe it is the cable that is failing but it wasn't as annoying so I didn't change it outright. Last two months the disapperances were all over the place - sometimes a few per day or a few over the whole week, or even just once a week. I decided to replace the SATA cable just in case and it helped or at least I thought it did. Another week has passed and it had just done the same thing once so far. Could it possibly be a faulty SATA connector on my motherboard or is the drive just failing? To my inexperienced eye, the SMART data looks fine with no reallocated sectors or anything like that but I’d appreciate it if someone more knowledgeable could take a look.

Apologies in advance for my English — I'm Korean and not very confident writing in it.

First, thank you so much to everyone who replied to my earlier post about bad sectors. I went back and checked again, and I found that if I'm doing anything else on the PC while the scan is running, sectors show up as orange (500ms). So I re-ran the scan on all three drives with the system completely idle.

Fortunately, as you can see in the attached screenshots, nothing looks like an actual bad sector. But I'm not an expert, so I'd really appreciate a second opinion. Screenshots attached.

One thing I'm unsure about: when I opened the side panel of the case, the bottom drive of the three was quiet at first, but near the end of the scan it started making a ticking noise. If the scan results are clean, is it safe to just ignore this and keep using the drive?

Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks again.

Finally opened a brand new WD My Book 12TB I had bought about a year and a half back (retailer returns period over, still under WD warranty), with the intention of using it for HyperBackup for my NAS.

Started doing some basic SMART and read/write testing to hopefully weed out infant mortality before using it for backups, but was taken aback by what seemed to me like quite loud mechanical whirring sounds just after the drive spins up, and what sounded like “clicks” every couple of seconds after that.

This is my first larger capacity external HDD, so wasn’t sure if this is normal or points to an immediate RMA being needed. Claude suggested the sound may have been amplified by the glass surface on my table and recommended I try placing a cloth underneath which did make the sounds softer, but the mechanical whirring is still unmistakeable in this video where I ran the SMART Status and Quick Drive Test via WD Drive Utilities. Both showed as “passed”, though I can’t seem to get smartmontools to reach the drive directly to read the raw SMART values.

Am in the midst of running a full Complete Drive Test which will probably take >12hrs, but am not sure if that is futile and this is already a clear RMA case, or if I’m just overreacting and this is normal?

Hi everyone,

Apologies in advance for my English — I'm from Korea and still learning.

I'm using a 4TB 5400rpm Seagate NAS drive. I've been running a bad sector scan on it, and 7 blocks came up in the 500ms range (orange). I'm not sure whether this is something I should be worried about.

I'd like to hear what others think. Is this drive still safe to keep using? Any input would be appreciated.

Thanks.

The OP in the following thread has prevented me from responding to it, so I have taken the liberty of doing so here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HDD/comments/1w05xux/9_petabytes_and_still_going_endurance_16_year_old/

Today (Aug 29, 2026) he is claiming that his 64GB SSD, which has a benchmarked transfer rate of around 100 MB/s, has recorded 9 petabytes of host writes.

On July 7, 2026 the SSD was reporting 3 petabytes of host writes:

https://www.reddit.com/r/HDD/comments/1uq5voc/controller_endurance_updated_notes_of_the_3/

https://www.reddit.com/r/HDD/comments/1um1lee/ssd_firmware_crashes_and_controller_failures_are/ovc5b36/

I've demonstrated several times that this is absurd, yet he continues to peddle this disinformation.

Here is some simple arithmetic:

(9 - 3) petabytes / 53 days = 1.3 gigabytes per second

https://www.google.com/search?q=(9%20-%203)%20petabytes%20%2F%2053%20days%20in%20gigabytes%20per%20second

This means that the OP's ancient SSD would need to be transferring data from the host at a rate of 1.3 GB/s, all day, every day. That's more than 10 times faster than its rated speed.

I bought six second-hand HDDs on Marketplace at a good price, all 1TB. Today I bought a Ugreen adapter to test them, and when I connect them, they do this.

What's going on?

They're supposed to draw 1A at 5V.

I already disabled USB power saving from the control panel

I have this external hdd I have been using. I have important stuff on it (1tb). I connect it to my laptop it connects, the blue light turns on, and it also spins but if I try opening it in file explorer I get "the device which does not exist was specified" message.

I check it in disk management it doesn't get listed and disk management hangs for some time and closes. I tried diskpart, and its status was unkown.

chkdsk too is saying "the type of file system is RAW"

I have important school stuff on the hdd and I want to recover it. any help will be appreciated.

EDIT: thanks y'all. I'll try all you have said and I'll give feedback soon.

I've been running a small Proxmox homelab for about a year now, mostly Jellyfin and Nextcloud on it. My external USB drive keeps dropping offline whenever there's any real load, then I have to reboot the whole box to get it back. I've swapped cables twice already and it hasn't changed anything.

Did an external drive dropping under load ever turn out to be a power problem for you?