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Dropped my 4tb HDD from chest height, how to check it's truly ok?

R

robodelfy

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 13, 2018
100
16
Hi

I didn't see my 4tb WD hdd was plugged into my laptop and when I picked up my laptop, the HDD got yanked out and hit the floor, it's a hard floor.

I plugged it in, and it seems to work. I checked various video files which is what I store on it. I also ran Disk Utilitys First aid and that was fine

But this is my main backup, and I wonder if I can trust it now? Or is there any way to really check if its ok? I feel it may be vibrating a bit more now, but that could be all in my head

Any advice would be great
Thanks
 
If it lost power and didn't hit concrete it may well be OK. The heads should auto park on power loss (which presumably happened prior to impact), so the heads shouldn't have hit the media.

If it was a 2.5" drive, i believe they even have motion sensors in them to auto park if the movement is too much.

But yeah, run some diagnostics as above.

You'd be surprised how durable drives are to this sort of thing most of the time.
 
keysofanxiety said:
Run SMART Utility to check the SMART data: https://www.volitans-software.com/apps/smart-utility/

If you haven't already you may need to install SAT SMART to support reading SMART data from external drives: https://github.com/kasbert/OS-X-SAT-SMART-Driver/blob/master/SATSMARTDriver-0.8.dmg

Best wishes.
Click to expand...

Thanks I installed the program, and it just says Passed in green...is that all? I didn't install the Sat Smart drives, do I need to if the first program worked?

Would DriveDX provide any additional info? As I had that but my trial expired. I considered buying it for $20?

thanks for the help, I just want to be sure my main backup is ok!
[doublepost=1536585655][/doublepost]
throAU said:
If it lost power and didn't hit concrete it may well be OK. The heads should auto park on power loss (which presumably happened prior to impact), so the heads shouldn't have hit the media.

If it was a 2.5" drive, i believe they even have motion sensors in them to auto park if the movement is too much.

But yeah, run some diagnostics as above.

You'd be surprised how durable drives are to this sort of thing most of the time.
Click to expand...
Thanks, the drive doesn't have any marks on it, which is strange as it was quite a height and a hard floor. The usb cable is a bit stiffer to connect now, but other cables work fine, so maybe that cable got a little bent out of shape in the fall.

Its hard to not be paranoid about it now! But I will not leave it plugged in like that again, its too easy to forget!
 
robodelfy said:
Thanks I installed the program, and it just says Passed in green...is that all? I didn't install the Sat Smart drives, do I need to if the first program worked?

Would DriveDX provide any additional info? As I had that but my trial expired. I considered buying it for $20?

thanks for the help, I just want to be sure my main backup is ok!
[doublepost=1536585655][/doublepost]
Thanks, the drive doesn't have any marks on it, which is strange as it was quite a height and a hard floor. The usb cable is a bit stiffer to connect now, but other cables work fine, so maybe that cable got a little bent out of shape in the fall.

Its hard to not be paranoid about it now! But I will not leave it plugged in like that again, its too easy to forget!
Click to expand...

Hi there!

So the "Passed" will mean it's all okay. Just ensure that your drive is listed on the left-hand side, otherwise it will just be reading from your internal Mac's drive. If there's only one drive listed, you'll need to install the SAT SMART driver, restart, then run SM again and select your external drive on the left-hand.

If it did show that and it shows Passed, you should be absolutely fine. If there are any errors on the drive with reallocated sectors, potential errors with the heads, anything like that - it'll all be logged on SMART.

SMART is all the same; if you imagine a spreadsheet with data, opening with DriveDX and checking the SMART is like opening in Excel compared to Apple Numbers. It's all the same data so it won't tell you anything different.
 
Thanks for the detailed respo
keysofanxiety said:
Hi there!

So the "Passed" will mean it's all okay. Just ensure that your drive is listed on the left-hand side, otherwise it will just be reading from your internal Mac's drive. If there's only one drive listed, you'll need to install the SAT SMART driver, restart, then run SM again and select your external drive on the left-hand.

If it did show that and it shows Passed, you should be absolutely fine. If there are any errors on the drive with reallocated sectors, potential errors with the heads, anything like that - it'll all be logged on SMART.

SMART is all the same; if you imagine a spreadsheet with data, opening with DriveDX and checking the SMART is like opening in Excel compared to Apple Numbers. It's all the same data so it won't tell you anything different.
Click to expand...


Thanks for the detailed response. yes I definitely selected the external SSD. And it showed Passed. It doesn't seem o show nearly as much info as DriveDX did. Would Drivedx be considered to be one of the best programs to check hard drives health? If so, I might get it for only $20, big theres nothing free or better

I read somewhere else that most external drives dont have SMART. Is this true? because my ones seem to if the program shows PASSED.

You can probably tell I'm not super tech savvy :)
 
I use TechTool Pro 10 to scan disk surfaces for bad blocks

Screen Shot 2018-09-14 at 00.33.09.png
 
Alternatively if this is something you;re going to be doing often, i would recommend purchasing a copy of DiskWarrior
It's an extremely useful piece of software for everything disks
 
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