Seagate Expansion Desktop Drive 3TB w/ bad blocks/sectors

Hi there.

For the past week I have been retrieving 2 TB of movies from my Seagate 3TB Expansion Desk drive (USB 3). It started acting funny after my room mate accidentally flipped the main power circuit for my bedroom while I was in the middle of a transfer. Oddly enough, I was in the middle of retrieving videos from a 6+ year old Verbatim 500 GB which had an ongoing power circuit issue when he flipped the switch. I was salvaging those videos to this 3TB drive at that moment. He killed that Verbatim dead to rights with the surge, and I believe it caused the issues on this Seagate 3TB.

I can still transfer data to and from the Seagate anywhere from 35-90 MB/s depending on if the other drive is a USB 3 as well. But it just will not play many movies, and HD particularly bad. I mainly use Kodi (XBMC), but have tried VLC and MPC. All fail at the same points or close in the different players. I assumed corrupt files but when I copy them to other drives then play them they work :thumb:.

So, I ran chkdsk I: /f /r . It ran thru quickly saying no issues. Every indicator has shown the drive as healthy. I ran the zero out option with a format in Partition Wizard. Didn't help. Frustrated last night I decided to run chkdsk I: /r one last time. It hung at 10%, and thinking maybe its doing something, I left it, but it was going for nearly 24 hours. I finally cancelled the chkdsk and ran a surface test with Partition Wizard and now after an hour or so, I am getting some bad blocks and Partition Wizard slows right down when it hits one. So far three.

To add, if I move the USB 3 cable it sometimes clicks the drive off and it disappears from Windows. I have had it show up in Partition Wizard as Bad Disk, but after a reboot the drive shows up, sharing and security settings all back intact. I might reboot again, and the drive simply won't show, or might take ten minutes to pop up. Then I might try and access the drive and get the warning "You must format this drive", but a reboot and its back. This has led to a long week of data retrieval.
I've replaced the USB cable, but it still can disconnect, leading me to believe the receiver slot and its attached circuitry might be shorting or whatever as well.

This poor drive. Its maybe just near a year and a half old, not a scratch on it, not making any funny sounds or nothing, my newest one, and was in fact a replacement for an HP 3 TB that failed on me back then.

I've been at it off and on for a week or so now and Partition Wizard is currently showing 197+ hrs time remaining :shock:
Am I wasting my time here ? Does it actually repair bad blocks, and with the circuitry sensitivity is it worth the effort ? Would I be able to salvage the drive from the case maybe ? I am an avid computer and tech user, but not expert on the hardware diagnosing end of things. Should I just toss this thing ?

You can try downloading: /62506/CrystalDiskInfo6_3_2.zip
then unzip it and run to check if your HD is in good health then we can go from there.

topgundcp said:

You can try downloading: /62506/CrystalDiskInfo6_3_2.zip
then unzip it and run to check if your HD is in good health then we can go from there.

Click to expand...

Thanks for that topgundcp. It doesn't seem to want to recognize the drive now. It did once, and there were no heat or health stats, and then shortly after the light on the drive went out and I have not been able to get it to kick back on again and have CrystalDiskInfo see it. Even reboots aren't working anymore. I am starting to lose hope in this thing
I hit 5 errors on the surface scan with Partition Wizard and was only at 0.81% when I stopped the scan and tried CrystalDiskInfo, and now this.
I'll try for a little while longer but this doesn't like it's going in a good direction.

That all said, I noticed on my laptop, which I am using to try to fix this drive that it said it has 51,529 "power on hours" (2147 days and 1 hour) and its internal drive is showing health status good. You win some you lose some I guess.

Sorry to hear that. FYI, external HD is not really designed for constant use due to heat, there's not much air flow inside the enclosure causing the HD to over heat and shorten the life of it. I did have the same 3TB HD as yours and even occasional use, it went bad on me and luckily I bought from COSCO and was able to return it.

Having said that, I would suggest to open the enclosure using this procedure from youtube and connect directly to the sata port inside the desktop and hope that the HD is still good and the problem might be caused by the USB interface board.

Here's the video from youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwK3L9JApXw

K. I will try that as it still hasn't come back on. I did notice it was getting pretty hot the last few days with all this testing.

Funny thing is I have 2 Seagate 1 TB's that are just as old the laptop. The horizontal ones like the Expansion Desktop but with the high gloss finish and the rounded front face. They shut down when you haven't accessed them in a while and fire back up when you do. Still going strong after 6 or 7 years.


Thanks topgundcp. Hopefully I can salvage it. Will let you know.

Update for now. Went and got myself a Western Digital 4 TB internal. Got her all set up and getting my movies back on to it.

156 MB/s when transferring from my other USB 3 drives was the highest I hit......holy crap .