Do you think my HDD is broken?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨mobergmann@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/274b89d9-e6ed-4ec2-979c-dfccc05bf546.jpeg

I bought two refurbished 12 TB Seagate HDDs, installed one in my server, put the other in a USB adapter, plugged it into the server, and then let it rot there until I would eventually decide to tackle the burden of doing backups. Well, I decided that the time had come, but when I tried to mount it, I couldn’t find it. It is not detected using fdisk, but I can see it with dmesg, and it is stuck at Spinning up disk… (see [1]). But that is not all: the most frightening thing is that it makes very faint clicking sounds.

Do you think it is broken and I need to get a new one, or am I just missing something? Also, is this adapter bad, or why did it break while doing essentially nothing but sitting around? (The adapter is the SABRENT EC-DFLT-DE)

[1]:

[16073.604900] usb 2-2: new SuperSpeed USB device number 11 using xhci_hcd
[16073.617618] usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=a578, bcdDevice= 1.00
[16073.617629] usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[16073.617633] usb 2-2: Product: SABRENT
[16073.617636] usb 2-2: Manufacturer: SABRENT
[16073.617639] usb 2-2: SerialNumber: DD5641988396B
[16073.621358] scsi host0: uas
[16073.622070] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     SABRENT                   4102 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[16073.624565] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
[16087.663473] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Spinning up disk...

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Comments

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Ulvain@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I used to call that sound “the clicking of death” whenever i used to hear it from an old HDD…

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Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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Romkslrqusz@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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rem26_art@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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

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the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

refurbished 12 TB Seagate HDDs

There’s your problem.

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- 4grams@awful.systems ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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…
  
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  - frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    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.
    
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brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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)

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- mobergmann@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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

ULA United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)

Jargon Definition

Starlink SpaceX’s world-wide satellite broadband constellation

[Thread #333 for this comm, first seen 3rd Jun 2026, 21:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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ryokimball@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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- frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- mobergmann@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I am now trying the freezer trick and tomorrow I will have an update :) Btw, such a nice read xD I really enjoyed it.
  
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- ryokimball@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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cybervseas@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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?

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- mobergmann@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I hope I will notice in reasonable time and go get a new one for the next backup :)
  
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- PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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comador@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
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.

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- jestho@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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
  
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  - comador@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    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.
    
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- mobergmann@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
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  - RandomLegend@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    what is the freezer trick exactly?
    
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  - comador@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Been so long I had forgotten the freezer trick lol. Good memories haha.
    
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Fewer Letters	More Letters
FCC	Federal Communications Commission
~	(Iron/steel) Face-Centered Cubic crystalline structure
ULA	United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)