Having a strange hard drive problem

[Calavera]

The drive is a 2TB Toshiba. A few days ago I was downloading to that drive and I noticed the download was going very slow. Not long after that the computer froze up and I had to restart it using the restart button on the case. After that the drive didn't show up in Explorer. It would show up in Disk Management as not activated and if I tried to activate it it would fail.

So I put the drive in a different computer I have that is also running Windows 10. In this computer the drive shows up fine and I am able to copy files to or from the drive with no issue whatsoever. I thought maybe the SATA cable or SATA port I was using went bad somehow. So I unplugged the SATA data and power cables from a working drive and plugged them into the Toshiba drive on my computer. Booting took a very long time. Something like 5 minutes to get to the desktop where it usually takes like 30 seconds. I also noticed that when the PC was trying to boot the drive was making a kind of clicking sound. I know that usually when a drive is making a noise like that it is done for. After booting up the drive did show up properly in Explorer this time but if I tried to access anything on the drive it was extremely slow and usually crashed Windows. After this I put it back in the other computer and it again works fine there.

I've had a similar problem happen before with a different drive. It quit working so I tried it in the other computer and it was working fine. So I then put it back in my computer and it has been working fine ever since. I figure if I ask this question on any computer forums the answer I am going to get is "The drive is dieing. You need to backup everything ASAP before it totally dies." But I really don't think that is the issue. Yes I did say it "clicks" when hooked into my PC but when hooked into the other machine it makes no odd noises at all and works fine. It it was in that bad of shape why would it work perfectly in one computer and totally fail in another?

But just to be sure I am running Seatools on it to see if it finds any problems. So far it has passed the short self test and is currently running the long self test. The only difference between the SATA connections on the two PCs is that mine is SATA 6GB/s and the other PC is 3GB/s but I'm not sure how that would make any difference.

Any thoughts? I would say something must be wrong with my SATA ports or onboard controller but the other drives work fine and when I plug cable from a working drive into this one it fails. So IDK. I haven't tried it with every SATA port but I might have to and see if it works with any of them.

It also passed the Seatools long test. So the drive itself is fine

[ian]

I'd say its the SATA settings SOMEWHERE. Which leaves it open to a whole bunch of reasons it works on one and not the other.
Different storage controller, different smart settings, different power flow, different data and error handling. Or a combo of any or all of those things.

It's shown weakness, so it's time to be added to a pile of crap... Throw it in a pile that it doesn't matter if it lives or dies.
I've just added a bunch of drives to my hoard pile of storage.. sure I can play with them, but if they fail it simply doesn't matter.

[Calavera]

Ok so while it was running the Long Test in Seatools I updated my BIOS to the latest version and did the same with the chipset drivers. After it passed the long test I put it back in my PC and it is now working fine. I don't know if updating the BIOS and chipset drivers actually fixed it or if it is just a coincidence but it is working in my PC now.

[Calavera]

Awhile ago I did have a drive go bad. It still works but shows "Caution" in Crystaldiskinfo. I forgot I still had it laying around and I also have a nearly new 2TB drive that I also forgot about.

There are some things I'd like to backup off the failing drive so I figured I'd just copy them onto the 2TB drive. First problem is that the PC I'm using to do this only has 2 Sata ports. So the failing drive and the 2TB drive will take up both connections. No problem though, I'll just boot Linux from a USB stick and copy the files there. Well apparently on Linux NTFS drives are only read-only which makes it totally worthless for what I am trying to do. First I tired Peppermint Linux then I read that Ubuntu allows read/write on NTFS drives by default so I then tried it. Same shit read-only.

I looked for other programs. That has to be some sort of bootable file manager or program that allows you to copy from drive to drive but I couldn't find it. So the only thing I could think of was to just install Windows 10 to the 2TB drive then boot it with the failing drive and copy it through Windows 10.

Some of you might be thinking what a noob idiot because there is a way easier way. That is fine, if there is an easier way please let me know about it for next time.