Weird failing disk issue under macOS

[RegretfulUsername]

I have a 5 TB external USB 3.2 HDD that was reliably in service as the disk containing the Time Machine volumes for all the different devices in my family's house until the other day. I reconfigured the Time Machine arrangement on a different disk, and tried to reformat it before re-using it. I plugged the disk into a Mac running macOS 13, opened Disk Utility and tried to perform an erase to a new APFS Encrypted volume with a two-pass overwrite. I have done this same exact process many times before with multiple different of these same 5 TB external USB 3.x HDDs on multiple different Mac computers and versions of macOS with no problem. This time, the process seemed to hang. It usually takes roughly 24 hours to do the two-pass overwrite. I came back to this disk after roughly 24 hours and it was only roughly 20-25% done. I let it sit for another 24 hours and it was still at the same progress percentage.

I couldn't find much about my issue by searching except one post where someone recommended force quitting Disk Utility and trying again after running First Aid. I did that and had the same problem. I tried doing it on a different computer. Still the same problem.

Then, I tried doing the process without the two-pass overwrite and it succeeded, despite taking much longer than it usually takes to do just a simple reformatting. At this point, I was really curious about the stability of the disk, so I started copying files from another disk to this problematic disk, and it seemed to be copying over, however it was going extremely slowly, almost like it was running at USB 2 speeds.

It seems to me that this drive is failing but it also seems very strange that it was working fine until I tried reformatting it. Is it possible for the controller on a drive to have the USB 3 portion fail while leaving the USB 2 portion working? I wouldn't have thought that could be a thing but that seems to be what's occurring here. And it would explain how the disk was continuing to function a the Time Machine drive, because it was able to write data but was probably writing at USB 2 speeds. But then that doesn't explain why the overwrite kept hanging.

Any ideas or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

 

[Fishrrman]

Sometimes it's just easier to replace the drive... (sigh)

 

[gilby101]

I plugged the disk into a Mac running macOS 13, opened Disk Utility and tried to perform an erase to a new APFS Encrypted volume with a two-pass overwrite.

Did you erase the drive or just the volume? To see drives you need to enable the menu option View > Show all devices.

Unless you are a candidate for targeting by government, etc. I would not bother with erase passes. Just erase the whole disk and create a single unencrypted APFS volume. TM will give you the option to encrypt when you add initialise TM. Add volumes for each Mac you use it with.

Be very careful if your different devices are running different versions of macOS. A more recent one, may update APFS on the drive to something that an old macOS can't use. Test, and be prepared to start again. You may need a separate partition (APFS container) for each deice.

 

[Brian33]

Is it possible for the controller on a drive to have the USB 3 portion fail while leaving the USB 2 portion working? I wouldn't have thought that could be a thing but that seems to be what's occurring here. And it would explain how the disk was continuing to function a the Time Machine drive, because it was able to write data but was probably writing at USB 2 speeds.

I have never heard of this happening. To me, it seems very unlikely. I have read plenty of times people reporting that writing to a "failing" HDD can work (for awhile) but be very slow.

I agree with @gilby101 that you probably don't really need the secure erase. However, another way to look at it is that it's a way to test that all the sectors of the drive can be written to. IMHO if the drive won't successfully do a secure erase pass, it's likely that there are real problems with it.

Unfortunately it's not easy to tell. One could use DriveDX to look at the S.M.A.R.T. data -- but in my experience that's often hard to interpret with certainty, too.

 

[RegretfulUsername]

For anyone who finds this in the future while looking for help with this issue, I received help on Reddit that seems to have solved the issue. I checked the S.M.A.R.T. status of the drive with a third-party tool, then ran the zeroDisk command on the disk in Terminal. It took a while, but after it finished, write speeds on the drive are back to normal and the drive seems to be functioning correctly.

In the spirit of not duplicating information, you can visit the link here to see the complete set of steps I took.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/17lh381