HDD giving up for seemingly no reason. Weird CHKDSK results

Hiya tenforums, hoping you could give me some advice regarding a strange HDD issue.

My brother has been having trouble with his HDD (F: drive), it will "stop" at random when downloading files, running big programs or moving files. He says GTA V would fail to load maps at random points; and file transfers will cut out for several seconds, then start again, then stop. It doesn't cancel it just slows down to the point where nothing happens.

After a while the drive completely stops, crashes his games and the drive stops being recognised by windows. Restarting the PC brings it back, but it will disappear again if he tries to open anything. Sometimes it also causes file explorer to crash so he can't use the taskbar, and task manager shows "file manager" closing and opening, and it keeps going if force stopped.

He ran CHKDSK /r and SFC /scannow, both found and apparently fixed errors but the problem still persists. Cables have been swapped, reseated, wobbled with no effect.

He has had this problem before, but the logs pointed to a binding of isaac mod so he uninstalled it. After uninstalling that, it has worked fine for just over a month. Specs are the ones in my profile, I will add a zip folder containing all screenshots and logs that he has sent me. Apologies for not having the raw logs, but I can get them if needed

Any help, ideas, advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Windows version 1903 (OS Build 18362.836)

The boot drive seems completely healthy, Kingston SSD Manager gives it 100% in health, 90% wear and no failures or warnings at all.

Yep, that screenshot is after it was changed to decimal. The HDD is right next to the case fan. but the SSD is right on top of it. That's decent air flow I think, unless the SSD being on top is blocking it?

Caledon Ken said:

Interesting that this drive gave all clear.

Lots of Read Errors and seek errors. Did you change the reporting to decimal.

Also it did not report Write Errors.

Is this drive getting lots of air flow over it?

Seagate HDDs usually report a lot of raw numbers for "Read Error Rate". That's a quirk of Seagate.
Same with "Seek Error Rate" on Seagate, IIRC!
But, the symptoms, combined with a very low attribute number for "Hardware ECC recovered", make me suspect a bad controller board on the HDD. (or bad RAM on the HDD board)

Huh. That's interesting about Seagate drives. I have just checked my own HDD, also Seagate 1TB, and it has a lot of read and seek errors too. I have never had an issue with this drive. I don't have the Hardware ECC Recovered attribute on mine though, but that could just be because I'm using an older version of Crystaldiskinfo



Thanks for your help everyone, the drive might still be under warranty since it's pretty new. I will have to check, but that would make things easier..