My external hard drive doesn't seem to be working anymore. There's a faint beeping noise when its first plunged in. Does anyone know what this means and if its usually under warranty? My external hard drive never goes anywhere, it stays on the desk.
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Seagate External Hard Drive
- Thread starter Dave Felix
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I recently had the same thing with a Seagate and in my case the hard drive had indeed failed. It was a nightmare. I stripped it apart and installed a new drive in the case, which got it working again. I was also fortunate that when I put the failed drive into an external caddy I was able to recover some, but not all of my data from that drive.
I'm not necessarily saying that's your case, someone may know better. But if that's your problem, it's worth doing what I did. It seems the Seagate just wouldn't function at all if it detected the faulty drive, even though some of it was recoverable.
Different brands, and different models of hard drives will emit a variety of odd noises when failing (or already failed)
Could be anything from clunks to beeps to faint sirens. Working in a repair shop, I have heard a lot of those
All those sounds have in common, is that there is no good news about your hard drive, and not much of a future.
And, a failing hard drive doesn't really mean that it has been dropped, or bumped, or any other physical "trauma". In the end, it is a mechanical device, with bits that will come loose, or break off, or the drive electronics (inside the drive itself) can be zapped by a surge. Any of a number of things can cause a failure.
And, should be covered by the warranty, as it's a drive failure.
You can look at the drive case, get the serial number, then go to the web site (like Seagate.com), and check to see if your drive is within warranty. There's usually a special link just for that at the support page for the manufacturer.
Could be anything from clunks to beeps to faint sirens. Working in a repair shop, I have heard a lot of those
All those sounds have in common, is that there is no good news about your hard drive, and not much of a future.
And, a failing hard drive doesn't really mean that it has been dropped, or bumped, or any other physical "trauma". In the end, it is a mechanical device, with bits that will come loose, or break off, or the drive electronics (inside the drive itself) can be zapped by a surge. Any of a number of things can cause a failure.
And, should be covered by the warranty, as it's a drive failure.
You can look at the drive case, get the serial number, then go to the web site (like Seagate.com), and check to see if your drive is within warranty. There's usually a special link just for that at the support page for the manufacturer.
Thanks i went to the site and started to process the return. Just sucks cause I will lose the information on there.
Download DriveDX...there is a free trial (or another App like it, but I mention this one as I have personal experience with it.) It will pull the SMART data and test the drive to help determine if it has failed or if it is failing. If you have really important data on the drive, you can use some software apps on your own to try to recover the data, or send it to a data recovery specialists. Unfortunately, professional data recovery is expensive, not always successful, and usually not included in the warranty with consumer drives. If you want to have the data professionally recovered, then it is worth leaving the drive powered off and not attempting any further action on your own, in my opinion.
If the return process is through the vendor rather than the maker, might be worth purchasing something other than Seagate as the replacement. I've personally had very inconsistent and sometimes very frustrating experiences, where as with other's I've had far more consistent and reliable experiences.
Further, in the future, it may be worth keeping at least two copies of your files, because every single hard drive will eventually fail, and predicting when it will fail is often difficult (SMART helps warn you when a drive is beginning to fail in many, but not all, cases, but both HDDs and SSDs can fail catastrophically without the slightest warning.) A RAID1 is a basic setup that would mirror the same data on two separate drives (or, alternatively, you could just manually save the files twice (to two separate physical hard drives.) So, if one drive were to fail, you would have a secondary copy of the same files, and would be able to replace the failed drive without risking data loss.
If the return process is through the vendor rather than the maker, might be worth purchasing something other than Seagate as the replacement. I've personally had very inconsistent and sometimes very frustrating experiences, where as with other's I've had far more consistent and reliable experiences.
Further, in the future, it may be worth keeping at least two copies of your files, because every single hard drive will eventually fail, and predicting when it will fail is often difficult (SMART helps warn you when a drive is beginning to fail in many, but not all, cases, but both HDDs and SSDs can fail catastrophically without the slightest warning.) A RAID1 is a basic setup that would mirror the same data on two separate drives (or, alternatively, you could just manually save the files twice (to two separate physical hard drives.) So, if one drive were to fail, you would have a secondary copy of the same files, and would be able to replace the failed drive without risking data loss.
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This is one very good reason to have redundancy in backup drives. I have multiple backup drives and each time I run a backup I back the same folders and files up on each of them, sometimes several of them. That way if one fails I've still got the important data on a second and possibly a third one. I also do not plug my drives into a dock, I plug them into the computer itself and when I have finished whatever I'm doing (retrieving a file, backing up files) I then unplug from the computer. I also use several types of external drives: desktop ones which require an external power source and remain on the desktop, portable bus-driven ones with platter drives and also portable ones with SSD drives. I keep an eye on the capacity of the drives, too, and when I'm getting close to 10% I retire that drive and purchase a new one.
I had the drive for less than 3 months - I only used it for time machine and a few other items. Thanks for the suggestions.