Take it out of the Sabrent USB and directly connect it to the system, run lsblk to get the drive id and then check smartmontools using smartctl -H /dev/(whatever disk it is)
This will tell you if the drive is hosed or not.
If it is hosed, can always dead drop it from one banana worth of height on a table to see if the drive heads unlock, then try again.
If it is hosed, can always dead drop it from one banana worth of height on a table to see if the drive heads unlock, then try again.
Or try the freezer trick. It has been many years, but it has worked for me.
Been so long I had forgotten the freezer trick lol. Good memories haha.
what is the freezer trick exactly?
Pop the disk into the freezer for a few hours (or a day). It has to be long enough for the components to all get cold. This shrinks the materials and could possibly unstick heads from the platters. I think it has worked two out of four attempts for me. This is a method to get access to the data of which you should extract as soon as possible.
Be cautious of condensation on the cold disk as it could potentially arc circuitry.
It was a method to unstick stuck drive platters, but hasn't worked since HDD manufacturing processes changed a few years ago. May work for certain drives manufacted pre-Covid, but that's it:
Nothing in that link explains why i wouldnt work anymore
I love that "have you tried hitting it?" is still a thing with hardware. Reminds me of my old Xbox360 that I saved from the red ring of death by packing it in a blanket so that it overheated, which worked somehow
I'm literally a subject matter expert (SME) on Enterprise Storage Arrays and can absolutely attest to 'hitting it' being an actual tier 3 support suggestion for spindle drives. It's still a thing and will continue to be one so long as spindle drives continue to exist.
Honestly I don't have a spare cable at home. I need to organize one and then test it, which is probably taking some time.
Okay, so... Mechanical drive failure sucks. You may not be completely out of luck, though.
First thing to try would be throwing it in a bag of rice and freezing it. The rice is just to help prevent condensation. In theory, the contraction from the freezing temperatures can help with some physical clearances or something like that.
Now... Definitely try that before this next step. In fact, try literally anything and everything you can before this next step. It is a stupid thing to do and I should probably be downvoted for even suggesting it.
But... I had an early iPod with a mechanical hard drive which I thought was dead. I was saving up money to send it off to be serviced because the warranty had expired. It was sitting on the top of my dresser. A friend came over and knocked it off, he picked it up and showed it to me, booting up and running just fine. Some months later it started clicking again. I weighed my options, and eventually I dropped it on the floor on purpose, picked it up and held the power button, and it came on without issue. Some time after that, My laptop hard drive started behaving similarly. Guess what? Removed the drive, banged it against my knee or something, stuck it back in the computer, runs without issue.
I am still not explicitly suggesting this. Those platters inside are made of glass and there is a very, very small gap between the surface where the data is stored and the needles which are doing the reading / writing. You cannot do this carefully enough to ensure that you won't shatter a platter or ram a needle into the metal substrate. But if you have nothing to lose... maybe some concussive engineering can help.
I love how, in the time it took me to tell that story, other people gave the same answer in a much more straightforward manner.
You: "Now listen child, and heed my tale of woe..."
Them: "drop it one banana"
Anything to avoid bananas in metric
I am now trying the freezer trick and tomorrow I will have an update :) Btw, such a nice read xD I really enjoyed it.
Most platters are not made of glass. Usually it's only the tiny laptop HDDs, which have not been used in new laptops for years. I've certainly never seen a 3.5" drive with glass platters.
take it out of that adapter. lots of people giving good tips but it's not worth assuming anything about the drive till you plug it directly in. that's a pretty high capacity drive, and shitty adapters can misbehave in fascinating ways.
faint clicking is normal from a drive of this size. bigger drives make bigger noises (especially those designed for use in enterprise environments).
when you plug it in, run smartctl -a on it and post it here. that'll be definitive for what's up before you try any of the more creative solutions here.
Clicking is ominous given that dmesg shows it's stuck at spinning up. Try it with another adapter on another computer. Otherwise I wouldn't trust it to work: what if you put data on it now and it fails?
IMO, if you ever hear the click-of-death on a disk whatever you do to get it going is purely to gain access and extract the data. That disk is a spinning dead man.
I hope I will notice in reasonable time and go get a new one for the next backup :)
I've never had good luck with any of Sabrent's USB drive enclosures lasting that long. The last one I had also stopped showing up and made the disk make weird clicking noises after a few months of just sitting there. When I took the disk out of it and plugged it into a computer via SATA directly, the drive was perfectly fine and had no SMART errors
Im pretty sure its that drive enclosure, that POS killed a brand new drive in a week so I warrantied both and the replacement did the same thing.
I have a bunch of this specific line of Sabrent dock from different generations.
For some reason, some of them are super finnicky about certain high capacity (over 2TB) drives. What’s even weirder is that I have two identical enclosures purchased at the same time, and for any given drive one dock will be weird but not the other - and it’s not consistently the same dock either.
If you must use the disk externally, I recommend that you try another dock or enclosure. Probably not a Sabrent one, lol.
Offhand I'd suspect a finicky adapter. Does the adapter work with other disks? Does the disk work when plugged into a server/computer directly?
Assuming it's the adapter being finicky - did you happen to try using other USB cables with the adapter?
When plugging into the system - Does the dmesg output display anything else useful, any warnings or anything? I would have thought it would give you the USB drive chipset vendor/model, I didn't think Sabrent builds their own chipsets but could be wrong.
Also would try doing a smartctl --scan followed by a smartctl -a /dev/YOUR-EXTERNAL-DRIVE and see what comes up. (those are part of smartmontools)
I only got that one drive (and that one usb drive) and the other drive is online. I would have to shut down my system, in order to test it. I can only do that in a few days.
When plugging into the system - Does the dmesg output display anything else useful, any warnings or anything?
Nope, just what I posted, IIRC.
I advise strongly against dropping it. That's only handy if you need to recover data. A shock will most likely reduce the life of the drive. If it doesn't work as expected after my advice, do not put data on it.
My thought is that the USB enclosure may not have enough power up spin up the drive. I have had up purchase separate ac adapters in the past to spin up mechanical drives for exactly this reason.
The easiest test is to just put it inside a machine with standard cabling and power it up. If it works, it's your enclosure. If not, move on. Don't use it.
If it works fine in the system, get a different enclosure. This one should work.
https://www.amazon.com/Enclosure-CLAVOOP-External-SATA-Recovery/dp/B0D6RH6JBH
I have 10tb server drives that sound like angle grinders at work when all 4 are working and in the beginning I thought something was wrong with them, but it has been 2 years and still all smart tests pass without issue.
So maybe issue with adapter, see if you can use a different adapter or plug it directly into pc or server
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| FCC | Federal Communications Commission |
| ~ | (Iron/steel) Face-Centered Cubic crystalline structure |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| ULA | United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture) |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.
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I used to call that sound "the clicking of death" whenever i used to hear it from an old HDD...
I bought a seagate once. Brand new. 250gb back in the days when that was a lot.
Brand new, put it into my computer, turn on my computer. It sees it just fine.
30 minutes later, my PC started reporting errors.
Dead. Seagate would not honor the warrenty. That was 2003. I've yet to buy another Seagate since.
I assume your drives are dead, just based on it being Seagate.
refurbished 12 TB Seagate HDDs
There's your problem.
Yes and no, I only buy refurbs these days, so long as they work out of the box, they have been far more reliable than retail drives from a box store.
Definitely higher incidents of DOA drives, but the ones that work, have been pretty solid.
Still don’t trust spinning rust, so in addition to dual parity raid, I also have a full backup copy. But I no longer have reservations about refurb drives..
This. I buy used, not even refurbished, but I check the health as soon as I get it. I've had a few come in dead or dying, so I immediately get a refund or replacement.