ThorSG1 wrote:I just replaced a 250 gig Hitachi Deskstar that I'd been using for years for non-critical online data storage. CrystalDiskInfo just started showing a yellow caution warning a couple of days ago so I thought I'd better get the data off it before it craters. Good thing I did. It took a few tries to get all the data copied because the drive kept disappearing from the BIOS. It's been my experience that once that yellow caution flag shows up and it's because of reallocated sectors, it's not long after that the drive dies altogether.
It has 100,322 hours on it. I got my money's worth.
If you want, you could try to revive the drive with HDD regenerator. It fixes soft bad sectors, sectors where the magnetic field has gotten weak over time. It took around 13 hours to fix 1208 sectors on my Hitachi drive. You can check the condition of my drive after the HDD regenerator run here: http://www.hddstatus.com/hdrepshowrepor ... n=3B504055
This same page was telling me to replace my HDD ASAP. Now it says everything is good. Granted, everything may not be totally good. But at least, I was able to make a successful sector by sector copy with Macrium Reflect to an SSD. Mind you, Macrium Reflect is VERY picky when it comes to reading bad sectors and will refuse to finish the cloning job more than any other disk image software I have ever used.