I bought two refurbished 12 TB Seagate HDDs, installed one in my server, put the other in a USB adapter, plugged it into the server, and then let it rot there until I would eventually decide to tackle the burden of doing backups. Well, I decided that the time had come, but when I tried to mount it, I couldn’t find it. It is not detected using fdisk, but I can see it with dmesg, and it is stuck at Spinning up disk... (see [1]). But that is not all: the most frightening thing is that it makes very faint clicking sounds.

Do you think it is broken and I need to get a new one, or am I just missing something? Also, is this adapter bad, or why did it break while doing essentially nothing but sitting around? (The adapter is the SABRENT EC-DFLT-DE)

[1]:

[16073.604900] usb 2-2: new SuperSpeed USB device number 11 using xhci_hcd
[16073.617618] usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=a578, bcdDevice= 1.00
[16073.617629] usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[16073.617633] usb 2-2: Product: SABRENT
[16073.617636] usb 2-2: Manufacturer: SABRENT
[16073.617639] usb 2-2: SerialNumber: DD5641988396B
[16073.621358] scsi host0: uas
[16073.622070] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     SABRENT                   4102 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[16073.624565] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
[16087.663473] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Spinning up disk...
  • comador @lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Take it out of the Sabrent USB and directly connect it to the system, run lsblk to get it he drive id and then check smartmontools using smartctl -H /dev/<whatever disk it is>

    This will tell you if the drive is hosed or not.

    If it is hosed, can always dead drop it from one banana worth of height on a table to see if the drive heads unlock, then try again.

    • jestho@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I love that “have you tried hitting it?” is still a thing with hardware. Reminds me of my old Xbox360 that I saved from the red ring of death by packing it in a blanket so that it overheated, which worked somehow

      • comador @lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        I’m literally a subject matter expert (SME) on Enterprise Storage Arrays and can absolutely attest to ‘hitting it’ being an actual tier 3 support suggestion for spindle drives. It’s still a thing and will continue to be one so long as spindle drives continue to exist.

    • PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      If it is hosed, can always dead drop it from one banana worth of height on a table to see if the drive heads unlock, then try again.

      Or try the freezer trick. It has been many years, but it has worked for me.

        • PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Pop the disk into the freezer for a few hours (or a day). It has to be long enough for the components to all get cold. This shrinks the materials and could possibly unstick heads from the platters. I think it has worked two out of four attempts for me. This is a method to get access to the data of which you should extract as soon as possible.

          Be cautious of condensation on the cold disk as it could potentially arc circuitry.