Hardware Seagate Laptop HDD - Should I worry about this?

[Deleted member 446461]

Greetings!

This HDD seems to have some things that I do not know if are dangerous.

The model is ST320LT012-1DG14C. It seems to be an old one. It came on a Venezuelan laptop, so I do not know if it has been covered with a metal case or not.

It has suffered like 5 slaps from my little brother (toddler) and one fall from a shelf (bumped into an exercise machine then bounced to the floor).

It works well, no file seems to have been corrupted, 8 sectors were reallocated and 1 uncorrectable error was reported.

The HDD, when spinning, seems to rapidly tick of a quiet way, it is only noticeable when there is a lot of silence and I am very close to my laptop.

When reading/writing constantly, the HDD seems to do some kind of whistling sound, which seems a bit less louder than the ticking sound when I put my head close to the part of my laptop where the HDD can be found.

There is no place I can dump the disk on; this is Venezuela. We do not have millions of HDDs to back up to, nor do we have the ability to get any more storage devices than the ones coming with our devices. We do not have the ability to get too much electronic devices, either, so backups can not be made.

Do these problems with the HDD have to worry me, considering the low density of the old ones? Someone said that the high density of the modern HDDs make them less reliable.

To the ones who are thinking to ask me to buy HDDs: I am underage. Try to convince my parents into buying a new HDD or an SSD for me, they are surely going to complain its Linux fucking up my HDD instead of degradation and wear-off -- basically, they are Windows normies, and they are bad at it, because they think that the devices do not wear nor degrade; they think the devices stop working because they are treated the wrong way. I do not think you will succeed, but if you really feel like you should CONVINCE, try your best. I really would like to see their reaction, especially from my father, which apparently thinks he is a genius nobody can beat. I will try to post their reactions in text.

 

[Kwyjor]

Well, if you can't get a new hard drive, what exactly are you hoping to hear?

Any data you can't afford to lose is data that should be backed up. Period. If you can't back it up locally, then you'd better find some kind of cloud-based solution.

I really would like to see their reaction, especially from my father, which apparently thinks he is a genius nobody can beat. I will try to post their reactions in text.

I doubt anyone cares. Sorry.

 

[Deleted member 446461]

Weird. During a badblocks run, the HDD stopped doing any noises. It is going at 96% right now.

 

[FAST6191]

Most really disturbing noises are audible over anything but a server room din or heavy printer session, especially if you have good young ears (spend too long in said server room or next to a heavy printer and...).

As mentioned above take what you can't afford to lose and send it to your own email or something such that you can still do something with the files you want. A USB would not go amiss if you can cobble one together.

If you have a DVD burner in it or spare USB consider making a liveCD so even if the drive dies you can still get something done. If it is USB 3 and you have a matching USB drive then so much the better.

A scan might have sorted the sounds you heard, however it might also just have been updates or something more basic that was churning the drive a bit.

A few slaps from a toddler is nothing, and a light drop on most modern things is often OK (they have nice G force sensors for a reason).

Beyond that be on the scavenge for a new drive from an old dead laptop. Might be easier said than done if you are joined by every vaguely tech savvy countrymen and their friends that know they once fixed something but someone has to be the first in these scenarios.