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Hard drive failure during Acronis True Image 2020 backup

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I have had two Seagate 4TB Barracuda drives fail over the past month. The second one failed during an Acronis True Image 2020 backup session. The first failed while displaying similar symptoms to those displayed by the second drive during its failure phase. The second drive was purchased to replace the failed first drive. Details of the computer hardware and its history are in the attached .pdf file. I'm at a loss to understand, solve and prevent a further failure were I to simply replace this most recent failed drive with another. I've used Acronis True Image for several years now and don't suspect it played a part in the drive's failure, just that it was working hard to perform a backup while the drive failed. I'd appreciate any ideas as to why, after years of trouble free service, the first drive failed and why the second followed hot on its heels.

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Gateway F drive failure.pdf 70.68 KB
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Stuart, welcome to these public User Forums.

Sorry to read of this issue and the Seagate drive failures, especially the latest, new drive after such a short time.

All backup applications will stress the drive hardware where backups are being written but yours is the first situation where the drive has ever shown such failure symptoms that I have come across.

For the Seagate drive to suddenly change from having a capacity of 4TB to being reduced in capacity to only around 1.6TB in unheard of for me and would normally indicate that the logic card on the drive itself had suffered a failure.  Seeing this exact same symptom on 2 different drives, one so new, would suggest that perhaps there is an issue with the SATA controller on your motherboard, or else with the power supply to the Seagate drive.

Unfortunately, it seems that once the drive has failed in this way, there is no method of recovering its full capacity again from your detailed document.  I would not be confident in installing another drive in place of the failed drive either, in case that suffers the same fate!

Given that this Gateway PC is now 8 years old, I suspect that you may be looking at the need to consider replacing it.

The problem could be caused by a defective power supply. I had a power supply that killed 3 SSD before I worked out that the power supply was defective and caused them to fail.

Ian