The first drive died after 3 days with a clicking sound after 30 seconds of boot (unable to access the drive at all), it seemed I had reach a certain point on the drive (I was movig all my files to this new drive) which made it fail. Luckily I could get a quick replacement in my shop.
This second drive I have for 3 weeks, this week I started to fill the drive again and it seems to fail again. No clicking sound this time but my drive became inaccessible. I ran the WD Data LifeGuard Diagnostics and the SMART status seems fine, even the QUICK test runs fine. However when running the extended test it stops after a while telling me there are to many bad sectors. I tried another SATA cable, unplugging as much peripherals (other HDD, DVD and USB devices) as possible and put the drive on it’s own power rail to ensure it’s not a PSU problem.
You could also try HDDScan’s surface scan. It will identify “slow” sectors, ie those sectors that are totally unreadable, or which require an excessive number of retries.
Here’s the result of HDD Sentinel, it tells me it has 35 days of life left and only 9 days of operation. The highest recorded temperature was 37 degrees. SMART issues: current Pending sector count has a value of 106, Offline uncorrectable Sector Count has a value of 94.
DDrescue is a multipass utility. It clones the easy sectors on the first pass and tries for the more difficult ones on subseqent passes. It can also clone your drive in reverse, effectively disabling look ahead caching.
