1 TB Hard Drive unhealthy

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pokernod

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I have a WD 1TB Hard Drive that Ive had for about a year (still under 5 year warranty) and it wants to rollover and die, or so thats how it acts (my own fault probably, I dont defrag as often as I should). Its got about a 6-20sec seek time right now, lol. Ive used it alot, for everything from main drive, partitioned.....to junk slave drive that I transferred and cleaned out all of my other smaller drives out onto to backup drive.....all without ever formatting the drive (so it even still has system drive junk on it from multiple OS' Im sure). One day I booted up and Windows just decided I didnt need about 300GB of the most important files that were on it, so it just deleted them all for me......Weeee, Yay! I finally got my stuff back but the drive is obviously sick so Im thinking of just formatting and losing a lot of stuff, since I dont have another drive big enough to trasfer to, and if that doesnt help, sending it back for a replacement (last option). Im not really sure I would want to transfer if I could as I suspect a few files with bad intentions.
So I really have two or three questions:

1) does formatting a hard drive improve a hard drives health or is it not good to format too many times (or at all unless necessary)?

2) If it does (can) improve the health of the drive, is there a "Better for the Drive" program that I should use to format this drive with?

3) I have plenty of stuff on here that I wouldnt want to fall into, well....ANYONES hands. What type of program is best for permanently wiping a drive for sending it out to be replaced.

Thanks Guys.
 
what i usually do is just run quick reformat on the drive and its all good (though u loose all your stuff). thats probaly what u should do.
 
There's an app called "Boot and Nuke" that wipes a drive, but many utilities will have the option to zero out a drive. Do this several times before you send the drive back to make sure it's blank.
 
Can anyone tell me where I might find more info on this subject (about new hard drives, everything I find is from mid 90's about 80mb hard drives and talks like they're huge)
 
1) does formatting a hard drive improve a hard drives health or is it not good to format too many times (or at all unless necessary)?

2) If it does (can) improve the health of the drive, is there a "Better for the Drive" program that I should use to format this drive with?

3) I have plenty of stuff on here that I wouldnt want to fall into, well....ANYONES hands. What type of program is best for permanently wiping a drive for sending it out to be replaced.

Thanks Guys.

1) I wouldn't expect a format to have much if any effect on the reliability of a regular desktop drive. If you were using something like DBAN to overwrite the entire drive on a very frequent basis (I'm taking daily for months at a time) you might run into problems down the road but in any realistic situation it should be fine.

2) see #1

3) At work we use DBAN to do a 7 pass overwrite of the entire drive before disposing of a system. This process basically writes randomly generated numbers over the entire drive ensuring none of the original files can be recovered. 7 passes is a bit excessive but if you want to be sure your data is gone that should do it.
 
yea if you want to wipe your stuff away make sure you use a software like dban or something. a reformat doesnt wip the information it just cuts the link to the information on the drive, and as it fills up the information left is just written over. i dont know what to recomend as per a specific software but you do certainly want one that will wipe your drive clean so no data can be recovered if you have things you wish to never see the light of day again lol.
 
Before I let this thing go, (and yea, I wouldnt want anyone to get a hold of all the baby rabbit and kitten porn I have :omg: :silent: JK Its a lot of bill statements and stuff from my bank, bills, online shopping, like Newegg for instance. And since most of you use them, Im sure you know how much could be drawn from just that) I still would like to know about the health issue thing.

Does formatting, or the like, help or hurt the drive?
Is it possible that I may be able to use the drive again without any problems after a good couple of successive formats?

Mak213 recommended a good formatting program to me once, lol.....Its on that drive somewhere and I dont remember what it was. Do you maybe remember or have come across a better one since, Mak? Or anyone?

Thanks for the help guys!
 
DBAN is as secure as it gets short of physical destruction.

GParted is the way to go for formatting the drive.

Have you tried CHKDSK on the drive to see if it could fix it?
 
Have you tried CHKDSK on the drive to see if it could fix it?

I did and thats how I lost the 300gb of alot of my important files, mostly art that I cant do without. Im sure there were probably some bad sectors and crap in there but I cant just let all that stuff go. I did a recovery and got it all back onto an old laptop hard drive I had but Im basically giving up on everything else on the 1TB and just want my drive back and healthy so I can just use it and start over. Im running a little OLD 40GB IDE drive right now. They were small, but I have to say, they were tuff back then. And if I find I cant keep the 1TB going after I format it (multiple time, this time) and get an OS on it, I guess I will Wipe it clean and send it to West D and see about getting a different one.
And thanks for the G-parted, that was the program that Mak suggested back then. It was a really good program , I just couldnt remember what it was.

Thanks for all the help guys, I guess I have a long Sunday evening ahead of me now. I wish I had another computer with SATA so I could do this without giving up my computer for the day. :sick:
 
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