HDD Failure or Virus?

[OnOff]

Cheers Canoe, like I EVER doubted you! ProduKey on the Hirens disc has retrieved the Product Key!

But what I find interesting is the Windows 7 Home Premium Product Key is DIFFERENT to the one on the label underside the laptop??? This laptop was bought brand spanking new from eBuyer from memory.

As for HDDs what are WD Reds like? Considering a couple of these to go in a Synology station:

https://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Other+products/4TB+Western+Digital+Red+WD40EFRX+3.5"+SATA+III+Hard+Drive+-+HDD+?productId=57264

 

[binky]

ok so HDD is old and more reliable technology (thought they might be) and SSDs are great until they go tits up with no notice. Considering I'm working on an 8 year old laptop which has never had any issues beyond Windows bloatware problems, I think HDD is fine for me.

 

[OnOff]

FFS! Put the new Samsung 850 SSD in and turned on with a Windows 7 disc in, we get "Windows Is Loading Files" and then that sort of peters out and it just sits there like it's hung.....

SO.....old HDD back in and it boots up fine eventually aside from the warnings ref the HDD. Playing with the disc that came with the SSD now, SAMSUNG Data Migration v3.0. All I've read on it says it's v.good. Using to seemingly clone the existing HDD to the SSD that's in a USB caddy. It's slow, has taken 40 mins to do 40%. Hoping I can put the SSD straight in the laptop afterwards and boot up! Not a clean install as I'd have liked as guess it'll be warts and all with all the old HDDs baggage.

The new SSD was formatted UDF when it came. Wonder if I'd have formatted it say NTFS first THEN stuck it in the lappy the Windows disc install wouldn't have hung?

 

[Sidewinder]

OK, as far as WD disks go, have a read of the following to see if it helps:

Based simply on the attached, I would say that the Gold disks were best, as long as the 5 year warranty covers them in large NAS units.

I have 10 WD 4TB SE units (now) here in my 12 bay NAS.

About a month ago, I had a disk fail, now as the unit is set up as RAID6, I can loose 2 disks and no data, as long as I don’t loose a 3rd when the array is rebuilding.

Sent back to WD, replaced under Wty. No problems.

This disk has been running almost continuously, since 26/04/14, reboots for power failures, some planned mains shutdowns, & reboots for OS upgrades and that’s it.

It hit 70 Deg C and shut the whole array down, just before (a few days before) it failed completely!

I suspect platter bearings, I’ve seen bearing problems with disks before when they are running constantly.

I suspect that this is the root cause of most disk failures in RAIDS, given the info I had on the disk failures we had in our control systems when I worked for the machine controls OEM.

We had the disk OEM & M$ investigating with our development teams, it was such a huge issue.

The failed disk I had was one of the first 4 fitted, it was one slot from the top, it did a few months of running with 4 disks, then the count was increased to 6 then 8 a few months later.

I’ve now fitted 2 hot spares for redundancy.

It’s done <20,000 hours really, with perhaps 5 cold starts & perhaps 30 warm re-starts (if that).

The table in the attachment would suggest that the “Gold” disk is perhaps the best option for any RAID system?

I've not included the disk speeds in the attache table as normally the network connection limits the data transfer rate, not the disk rpm.

I have 4TB Se's, using Novatech as an example, Se £192.00, Gold £227.99 so a difference in price of  £35.99 and the "reliability" differences quoted in the pdf.

WD are pretty standard with the comparison data to be fair.

Hope this helps out in the selection of disks.

View attachment WD disks.pdf

 

[OnOff]

SORTED!

Thanks to all.

Simply put the new Samsung SSD in a USB 2.0 caddy and used SAMSUNG Data Migration v3.0 that came with the SSD to clone the disc. 500GB source to 250GB new SSD took about an hour and a half. It finished the cloning, stuck the SSD in the lappy and fired it up, original desktop the lot. From hitting the pwr button to desktop now about 14secs which I'll live with. Shuts down quicker too. And of course quicker in between. Well impressed by the migration utility.

 

[Sharpend]

Well I'm disgusted with both you and paddler, sidey has taken all evening to write up his post and you both have disregarded it completely. Shame on you. :innocent :innocent :coat  

 

[OnOff]

Well I'm disgusted with both you and paddler, sidey has taken all evening to write up his post and you both have disregarded it completely. Shame on you. :innocent :innocent :coat  

We WERE both working on equally lengthy responses singing his praises and attention to detail actually.....but I'm not going to bother now!   

 

[Sharpend]

We WERE both working on equally lengthy responses singing his praises and attention to detail actually.....but I'm not going to bother now!   

:Applaud