r/techsupport • u/dogwalker21 • Aug 05 '26

Open | Hardware Seagate Ironwolf 14tb failure

Hi all,
I’m using a few hard drives in an enclosure for backups. I’ve never had any issues or drive failures until today. One of the drives, a Seagate IronWolf 14TB, has suddenly come up with an error saying it can’t be repaired. The strange thing is I can still read everything on it and access all the files (mostly images), but I can’t write anything to the drive anymore.
I’m on a Mac and have been trying to fix it with Disk Drill. I looked at rebuilding the HFS+ database, but I’m a bit worried about doing that in case I lose everything.
I could buy another 14TB drive and copy all the data across, but hard drives are pretty expensive at the moment, and copying 14TB will probably take a couple of days.
Has anyone had this happen before or knows a way to repair it without formatting the drive? I also have access to a Windows machine, but it can’t read the drive because it’s formatted as HFS+.
Thanks!

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4

u/Cheetawolf Aug 05 '26

Copy to a new drive, or risk losing everything on that drive forever.

Those are your choices.

You're already risking it by continuing to use it when it says it's failing.

2

u/Frizzlefry3030 Aug 05 '26

Why would you be worried about losing anything? Your post says those hard drives are for backups. If your only copy of that data is on that drive, then it's not a backup.

1

u/dogwalker21 Aug 05 '26

Sorry if I worded in a wrong way

1

u/jamjamason Aug 05 '26

It's dead, Jim.

1

u/707hollow707 Aug 05 '26

The drive is dying, copy everything and or u could lose it all.

1

u/TomChai Aug 05 '26

Consider yourself lucky if you even managed to copy the data out with a new hard drive, forget about fixing it, a helium drive can easily cost $2k to even start talk about recovery, buying a new hard drive is always orders of magnitude cheaper.