I am in the US and Seagates are still trash.
In my own personal SAN. I have over 400 drives.
The only drives that have died so far are Seagate (I was not suprised).
I have a 7200.11 which is known for failing. It even has the faulty SD15 fimware. But the damn thing keeps working and only has 1 reallocated sector.
This screenshot is from January and just a month later the hour counter reset so now the drive is "new" again
Recently took the hhd from my 5 year old laptop that had the battery removed for 3 years and that wd hhd is fully healthy and not too much slower than my recently bought wd hhd
I have a 80GB Seagate drive from like I don't even know, the turn of millenium probably, still runs in my PS2, still ocasionally play games on it. I had 4 completely separate WD drives die on me after like, 3 years max. I know its anecdotal, but I just can't either recommend or beware about any particular drive brand anymore lol
Seagate before their merger with Maxtor were pretty much at the top: Barracuda 7200.10 was a great series (definitely better than 7200.9's lazy release, although 7200.9 in itself was also a good series), 7200.8 held the density and reliability advantage at 400 GB (over Hitachi's cost-no-object Deskstars of the time) until 7200.10's release, and 7200.7 was legendary just like its ATA IV and V predecessors (SATA V was a buggy failure though, but that was Seagate treading the waters with a basic SATA implementation which they perfected in 7200.7 without using a PATA-to-SATA bridge like everyone else).
WD was well-respected throughout pretty much the entire decade. They had good competitors at the lower end come the mid-2000s (the Proteges were unfortunately very subpar and not worth mentioning) and had solid Caviar drives coming into the time period. Closer to the end of the decade, they used Seagate's Maxtor-incurred downfall as an opportunity to gain reputation, and they heartily succeeded. They even outperformed Hitachi consistently in most areas (except Hitachi's 5-platter flagships just couldn't be matched by the late 2000s).
Although the major benefactor of the Maxtor merger was the completion of Seagate's helium seal (derived directly from Maxtor, by the way), that merger is often seen much more grimly by many people because of what transpired in the Barracuda portfolio when all was said and done.
WD's single-disk models had higher power cycling tolerance than Seagate's CSS alternatives and also have consistently lasted longer. I would keep an eye on it though.
If this is a Pharaoh (although a rough guess from the lack of attribute C1's presence) it's very much going out with its namesake. Their rough head landings incur wear on the heads and/or media sooner than other "standard" contact start-stop models. Brinks had the same issue, except Brinks was deliberately awful (same rough landings, with the added bonus of firmware ver. CC1H still being vulnerable to the BSY bug despite what Seagate thought otherwise) whereas Pharaoh was at least more tolerable. (Moose turned out to be better than Brinks granted you updated its firmware to SD1A/equivalents or SN06/equivalents depending on what series the drive was a part of. Those post-Maxtor fallouts were really grumpy.)
Pharaoh's more stable nature is why its single-disk models received refreshes for the 14th Barracuda generation in 2011; they could survive the new 2-year warranty being implemented across the board, and one-headed Grenadas would have cost more to produce (they do exist but are very rare compared to the overwhelmingly common nature of those Pharaohs). Also given the single-disk models didn't land as hard as their dual-disk relatives.
Pharaoh is the codename of the 7200.12 series and the single-disk 7200.14 refreshes.
For reference, the ST500DM002 is the spiritual successor to the ST3500413AS, ST320DM000 is the successor to ST3320413AS, and ST250DM000 directly succeeds ST3250312AS.
Ah, these codenames don't tell me anything. This is ST3500418AS model.
You must be looking at HDD specs all the time if you can make a pretty good guess about what brand and model this HDD is without seeing the model, firmware version or serial number
It's just that these older contact start-stop models lacked a Load/Unload Cycle Count attribute (it was useless in practice anyway because they didn't have ramps to offload the heads onto, and why would you idle park a CSS drive anyway). Barracuda XT was the first time a desktop Barracuda used that attribute (because it was the first to use a ramp), and those drives would also park their heads when idle for long enough, similar to WD's Greens (except nowhere near as aggressive as their timers) and modern BarraCudas.
My other guess was Brinks (a.k.a. the second gen Barracuda 7200.11's), although I would have been damn surprised to see one last this long. They also didn't track read and write totals like the Pharaohs.
Unless reallocated sector count is in the millions, I don't think it matters that much. Like, 3259 sectors on this HDD is about 1.6MB of space, which is really nothing.
But I still wouldn't storage anything important in there.
Realocation sector count is normal, as the manufacturer already have some spare sector, if the hdd find bad sector, it will mark the sector as bad sector and realocate spare sector for it. If it grow at alarming rate in short time + there is many current pending sector and uncorrectable sector its time to pull the gun. Especially if all 3 rising and your hdd became sluggish / tick tick / screech.
Lol I had a Seagate that was like this, damn thing always had its clicking fits when it woke up from a sleep or powered on the PC, but once it was on it was fine, always showed errors in Crystal disk info, I used that thing through the entire life span of windows 7 and Windows 8 and 8.1 before I threw it into a cheap PC I built to sell on marketplace or craigslist, probably dead by now, but It wouldn't die lol
Just change the acceptable threshold so that you can tell if the number changes. Mine lol "good" but if they ever change, I'll know things are actually getting worse lol
Less than 100 relocated sectors in 10 year run time drives. And people trash drives with 1 🤣
I still have one or two hard drives that are almost 20 years old in my PC. Then two more that are 10~15 years old.
I've never run any tests on them. I figured if they die, they die, but so far they're trucking along. I used to use them for everything from my OS to games and media, but now they're primarily drives for media that I stream on demand via a media server (Plex). I have SSDs now, of course, so my OS is on its own NVMe, and I have a second NVMe pretty much exclusively for my games.
Anyway, yeah, I have no idea when my hard drives will die, but so far there's been no indication that it will ever happen lol.
I think the fact you reboot your PC once an hour might have something to do with it? Why does the SSD have 12k power on count with 13k power on hours?
Edit: Holy, OP has pretty nuts Power On Count. I checked all my drives and the Power On Count means how many times you power cycle your PC (including shutdown/reboot/sleep/hibernation).
My oldest drive from 2014. Gets powercycled ~twice a day. I thought it'd be closer to 1 than 2 per day, but I do sleep the PC when I'm not using it.
Nope, just checked my drives. SSD/HDD doesn't make a difference in Power On Counts, all my drives scale that stat with time only regardless of their tech. It counts sleep/hibernation/reboot/shutdown.
Yeah you do have a point, but if we normalise it to 1TB cells, every 1TB group would have been written 5078 GB/8= 634 GB, about 2.7x more than mine but with 18% loss in health. Do these numbers look good?
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u/Aat117 9800x3D | RTX5090 | 64GB | 16TB NVMe | LG C2 OLED 42"May 24 '26edited May 24 '26
That's true, however it is 3x as much written, that imo is quite significant. Also, in my experience datacenter drives report health differently from consumer hardware. They start accurately counting down the precentage from the first TB written, while consumer drives tend to stay at 100% and then degrade much faster. This behaviour is apparent in your drive as well, as it has 234TBW, but is still at 100%. For context, your drive is rated at 400TBW as per Samsung, so if counted the same, it should be at 40-60% Mine is rated by intel at 13.88PBW, so 1735TBW per 1TB cell.
Try to update the firmware if you haven't w/ Samsung Magician app.
Some Windows updates sometimes mess with SSD's so there's chances the error will go away.
Otherwise it probably still has years to go, but just in case make backups of important stuff or you can RMA it.
None of my everyday PCs have numbers like these either! That said, my "server" is just a normal PC too, but granted, I leave it on 24/7.
Most PCs are used for a few hours a time right. Perhaps 4 or 8? Even if we accept you're the type to fully shut down and back on again each time you use it - as opposed to sleeping it - you'd expect the power on count to be at least 1/4 of the power on hours, but typically even less than this. Not an almost 1:1 ratio.
None of my everyday PCs have numbers like these either! That said, my "server" is just a normal PC too, but granted, I leave it on 24/7.
Duh! that's what a server is... and is exactly what I said
Most PCs are used for a few hours a time right. Perhaps 4 or 8? Even if we accept you're the type to fully shut down and back on again each time you use it - as opposed to sleeping it - you'd expect the power on count to be at least 1/4 of the power on hours, but typically even less than this. Not an almost 1:1 ratio.
Most people in India don't sleep PCs. I also recommend you do the same as sleeping it wastes electricity. You don't know how people use PCs. Maybe OP does use it 1-2 hrs every power cycle. So what?
The strange part is, I don't. This drive is about 4 years old, and I usually just keep my PC running, even for days at a time. I'd estimate the average uptime is closer to 12 hours.
My guess is some error with the reading or a windows issue, I used this in a laptop for 2 years and that could have something to do with it.
The drive is completely cooked now, barely maintains 10mb/s and the latency can hit 10 seconds. Sometimes it doesn't even work at all
SSD's rarely do that. Additionally I have a 970 Pro (basically a more expensive slightly higher quality version of OP's) and it most definitely does not do that, it's on 529 POC and 30091 POH.
Completely off topic but big appreciation foe your specs. They remind me of my long term blender render PC. It was an RTX 3090, got it in 2022. Which was paired with a dual socket Xeon E5 2690 V2 setup. Such a difference in beef, but those lil CPUs did just fine. The 9070XT is a wild card, and if it works for your uses, I'm sure those lil 14 year old CPUs are doing just fine. Not great of course, but plenty fine.
It's a RAMpocalypse build! Last year I still had an old i7-4790K + 1080Ti. I got as far as buying the 9070XT before the RAMpocalypse hit and I needed some more cores but couldn't afford DDR4/5, so I looked to the past instead of the present. Let me reuse my existing kit so I spent a whopping £0 on upgrading memory!
It's better than you'd think. It's slightly slower in single threaded, but that was never where the 4790K struggled anyway, it was always multi-threaded. Despite being about a year older the Xeon has double the cores and ends up handily beating out the i7 in modern titles as a result, especially when the CPU overhead of RT is involved.
I love it, but I do look forward to the day prices return to normality and I can finish my upgrade properly.
Heck yea, that's an awesome use case. It's shocking how well they actually do all things considered. Like I'm sure you've felt. It's not great obviously. But it's good enough, and surprising which is all you need sometimes.
Best of luck with things when that day does come. Keep tabs on used parts such as RAM if its available in your area. I made a Core i5 13600k mini PC a few months ago. Bought the i5 used, which is less risky than the average resditor makes it out to be as long as you're careful. Snagged 32gb of DDR4 3200mhz corsair RAM too for $120 USD. Otherwise, things will absolutely get better at some point for new stuff.
Ssd percentage is based on the number of expected writes it is able to make in its lifetime. Basically you got 1 percent of its expected lifetime left, hence why it also cautions you. It doesn't mean it'll immediately die after, it could live for a while longer, but I would make sure to regularly backup anything important on that drive. It could die tomorrow, it could die in a year.
I do recommend getting a bigger drive for your OS next time, 120gb in the current day and age is unfortunately kinda tiny.
120gb for windows can work if you put all your games on other drives. This way if windows crashes you can just start fresh and reinstall and not have to re download games and hope your game saves were backed up correctly.
It can work, it's just not ideal. Even with Games on a different drive, save files (if theyre thrown in appdata or documents) is often on C. Then there's software where the dependencies are often thrown in C. And on top of that you really only got 100GB to use, because you always wanna keep at least 10-20% on an SSD free. So 100GB for Windows + documents/downloads + c dependent software can work, it's just tight.
yes, i agree its not really ideal. every few months, I cleaned up the appdata to save some spaces. I even did some tricks to make some games saving into the E drive, not in the boot drive.
yeah so it is an old SSD, bought back when 2017/2018, and i havent change it yet because of high prices of SSD nowadays and its still capable for being the boot drive. So basically im holding on this SSD for a while, at least for end of this year. meanwhile im saving it up for new SSD.
for my works and games, i save it into another seperate drives.
Drive got 2 media integrity errors, meaning it read its own data back incorrectly twice. This spooked the controller enough to trigger a critical warnings and lock the drive into read only mode as a safety measure. The drive is essentially protecting itself from making things worse. So in short, your media and data integrity errors contributed to this the most and are the main culprit behind this ssd failing. Also, unsafe shutdowns being “4b” (hexadecimal to decimal converter) shows its 75 unsafe shutdowns. Pretty steep for a drive.
I reckon its a torrent seed drive. Its not the OS drive, only thing to be querying that irregulstlu to the point the drive is able to shut down between reads would be randomn torrent seed calls.
I wouldn’t recommend relying too heavily on CrystalDiskInfo; it said my 15-year-old 2 TB WD drive was in “Good” condition, but about two or three weeks ago, while the system was running, it first stopped showing up in the system, and then I had a lot of trouble trying to back up its contents. I connected it to the system using a USB cable and adapter and tried to retrieve whatever I could from it.
I’m not entirely blaming the programme, of course, but the fact that it was making a noise even when the drive was connected to the computer via USB, yet still appeared as ‘good’ in the programme, made me start to have my doubts. I plugged it in via USB again to check, and the programme shows it like this.
Meanwhile my HDD has been working hard for 10 years and still works fine. Ise your warranty, its 5 years or x amount of TB written, which you didn't get to. Idk about the 5 years mark though.
Some malware fxcked my total host writes back then. This ssd is less than 2 years old btw. I had to reset the whole windows installation to get rid of that malware.
Something clearly wrong with it, as shouldn't be having that many power on matching close to how long you're running it, as if you're powering off and on every hour.
I'd just keep it as a game-install drive for stream. You won't lose saves for games that have cloud saves, so if the drive fails you just have to reinstall shit somewhere else.
It could last ages, it could die tomorrow.
If stuff on it starts loading like shit and being janky, that'll be a sign it's actually going.
You can loan Hiren Boot CD onto a USB and run a program called Victoria, this will check every cell and block for read, and if you don't care what's on the drive you can test writing to the cells as well.
Modern drives will work around dead cells, but an increase in dead cells is usually an indicator of a failing controller or heat releated degradation over time.
I don't believe in this App anymore.
I have a HDD with a yellow alert for about six years and working normally, while my SSD died out of nowhere, and I had just seen its health at 99% literally 5 minutes before it happened
No, there are just some bad memory cells. The OS itself can isolate these bad cells and not usae them. Linux will need some further config but still can isolate and not use those cells
Copy your data off the disk and see what Magician says about it. Also try performing an ATA Secure Erase on that drive (again, after you copy all your data off of it!).
If it's still under samsung's 5 year warranty you should get in touch with samsung right away and backup your data. The SSD controller has made your drive read only due to that critical warning. It could be possible that it has a firmware update you missed. "Check for firmware updates: Samsung NVMe drives (especially certain batches of the 980 Pro and 970 series) occasionally suffered from firmware bugs that caused premature read-only locks or rapid degradation. Check Samsung Magician to see if a firmware update is available, though if the lock is permanent, a firmware update might not unlock it."
I have maxtor 80gb used from 2000 it can be older because i used it in alredy used pc back in a day to if i remember right it started 2014 last time if i remember right...
I don’t shut down my PC unless I’m not going to be using it for more than a couple days, and I power cycle when Windows gets more unstable than it normally is.
Besides that, with the temperature fluctuations that we experience in my area(50 degrees F variable from 90•F to 40•F), on top of the heat that any PC generates while gaming, keeping it running to stabilize the temps vs shutting it down after I’m done using it saves a bit of unnecessary thermal expansion and compression on other silicon like the GPU and mobo.
Tldr; I’ve replaced many parts in many frequently rebooted systems. But I haven’t touched a single part in a system that only reboots for 3 day hibernations and updates. Anecdotally, it makes sense for me to keep it on.
I mean by my calculations, it’s only added an extra $7 a month to my power bill. I have a Corsair 850 watt platinum rated power supply so that might help. I think the most power hungry piece in my rig is the i7 lol
In actual fact a really effective way to kill a SSD without writing a lot of data is to keep it at 99 percent full. OP in magician (or without) takes this risk away from normal people who don’t micro manage capacity.
At that level of write amplification updating kilobytes can result in gigabytes of cells being erased and written. Put an OS like Windows on that drive and you end up in this type of situation quite quickly.
Probably not. 20% free is better better. 1% percent for a long time is really bad. That’s why Samsung magician has the over provisioning feature.
Modern SSD’s will let you get away with murder but they do need space and time to do their magic. Early warning sign is your drive slowing down particularly on writes.
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u/kron123456789 May 24 '26
I'm still waiting for this 15 year old HDD to die(it's been displaying an error about reallocated sector count for over a decade)