Portable drives · job notes · RDG-2025-1469
Six Weeks of Slowing, and Then It Was Gone.
Six weeks was all it took. A dealer with a unit in the Hungerford antiques trade watched his drive give ground a little at a time — a minute to appear, then five
, then the wheel goes round and round when I click a folder
, and in the end the lamp comes on and that is the lot
. His entire working record was on it: stock photography built up over years, the inventory database, condition notes, and the valuation images that are now the only picture anyone has of pieces sold long ago. Somebody had once told him to defragment the thing. He never got round to it, and that is the luckiest fact in the case.
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What actually caused it.
Nothing in the case is stiffening with age. What you are watching is addition. One retry on a sector costs nothing you would notice; fifty retries cost real seconds, and the bill grows as the weak region spreads. Previews are where it shows up first, since no thumbnail can be drawn without hauling a whole file up through every one of those retries. So the disk is not running slowly. It is answering the same request over and over before it answers at all. And the morning it stops appearing entirely is that same addition applied to mounting: the machine has to negotiate with the drive before it can put a volume on screen, and that exchange now runs longer than the machine will tolerate.
What this one needed on the bench.
How every job runs →| Bench tools | Its part in this job | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | The hard passes ran over SATA, timeouts tuned to whatever the failing head could manage | It maps the heads before anything is taken off, keeps to one platter side per pass, and stays in charge of the resets, the timeouts and the power |
| DeepSpar USB Imager | First pass ran through the bridge board inside the enclosure itself, with no operating system in the path | Copies at full rate straight through the enclosure's own USB board |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Folder tree reconstructed from the images, then the whole lot written to a replacement disk | Opens volumes other tools refuse: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs |
What the bench did.
Measure first, open nothing yet
There is a fixed number of reads left in a drive that is going, and spending one to satisfy curiosity spends it permanently. So nothing was opened on arrival. Measurement came first. Reallocations were high already and had not stopped rising, and a survey run head by head then found the fault: of the four, one answered late, and later again on every pass after that. Its zone turned out to be precisely the ground where the previews had been failing.
Get the healthy areas off before they stop being healthy
Order of work came from confidence, not from sector numbers. The three dependable heads ran at full rate and cleared their zones inside a working day. That put most of the archive out of the fault's reach while the disk was still in a cooperative mood. Restraints came off after that — longer timeouts, resets under supervision — and attention moved to the region that had cost him his six weeks.
The slow head last, and a rebuild onto fresh media
The slow head's territory came last and gave ground grudgingly: a stall, a pause, a power cycle, another attempt. Everything retrieved from it was written to a new disk under the folder layout the archive had always used, so that his cataloguing resumes at the point it broke off.
What went back.
Very little was lost. The inventory database came back, the condition notes came back, and so did nearly all the stock photography. One batch from the earliest sessions lay inside the failing head's ground: part of it returned damaged, part of it not at all, and every item in that category is named in the report. Re-photographing the sale catalogues is possible, since the printed copies are still on the shelf behind his counter. The valuation images are not, because those pieces left with their buyers years ago.
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Other portable drives on the log.
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