Bench record · Pocket-size drives · BHD-2025-8319
Every Week It Was Slower, Then It Was Gone.
Six weeks. That is how long the man who keeps the records for a village out past Meriden spent watching the drive get worse — a minute to come up, then it was five
, then you open a folder and the circle just spins
, and finally the light is on and there is nothing there
. On it sat the village's own record: minute books scanned back to the 1890s, work done on the war memorial, photographs gathered at open days. He had been advised to defragment it and had never got round to it, which was the luckiest thing about the case.
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What that means.
Waiting is a sum, not wear and tear; nothing in there has gone stiff with age. A sector that answers on the second go costs you a fraction of a second, one that answers on the fiftieth costs a great deal more, and the total grows as the bad region spreads. Previews go first, because building a thumbnail makes the disk pull the entire file, every retry included. The morning it will not appear at all is the same sum done during mounting — the handshake a drive has to finish before the machine will list it takes longer than the machine is prepared to give it.
What did the work here.
The order of the work →| Equipment | The job it did | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Finished the hard passes on SATA, with timeouts set for the slow head | Head mapping first, then one surface at a time, with resets, timeouts and power all governed |
| DeepSpar USB Imager | Took the first sweep straight through the caddy's USB bridge, with no OS involved | Standard-speed imaging, taken through the USB bridge |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Rebuilt the folder tree out of the images and laid it down on the new disk | Handles the file systems other tools give up on: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS, Btrfs |
What we did.
Measure it first, and do not go browsing
Nothing was opened when it came in. A drive on its way out has only so many reads left, and any you spend on a browse are spent on nothing. So the first job was numbers: a reallocated count already high and climbing, and a survey of the heads that showed one of four replying late and getting later. The area covered by that head was exactly where previews had stopped drawing.
Clear the good ground while it is still good
The imaging followed confidence rather than sector numbers. Three of the heads ran at full pace and had their zones off inside a working day, which put most of the archive out of danger before anything hard was asked of the drive. Only after that were the limits relaxed — longer waits, resets under control — and the passes moved onto the region responsible for six weeks of waiting.
Crawl across the bad head, then rebuild on a healthy disk
The slow head's territory was taken at walking pace, with a pause and a power cycle every time it stalled. What came back went onto a fresh disk arranged the way the records had always been arranged, so it could be plugged in and filing could carry on from where it stopped.
How it closed.
Losses were small. The minute books returned, so did the war memorial research, and so did most of the photographs taken at open days. One batch from the earliest scanning sessions happened to sit under the slow head and came back broken or not at all; every one of them is named in the report. Those minute books can be scanned once more — the originals are still locked away. The photographs that were only borrowed went back years ago.
Other pages worth a look here.
Also filed under Pocket-size drives.
Is yours behaving the same way?
Switch the device off, post it in, and decide nothing until the diagnosis comes back to tell you where you stand.