I had 2 hard drives fail today

[MerlinRML]

The eSATA spec calls for a maximum cable length of 2 meters. That's about 6.5 feet.

I think it's likely that the poor signal across your long cable caused the hard drives to think they were having problems and mark sectors as bad. If you get new hard drives, I'd recommend you also rearrange things to be able to use a shorter cable while you're at it or you're likely to find yourself in the same situation.

 

[vss1980]

Just suffered from the same thing, except that practically, it's impossible to know exactly when the issue on one of my drives actually really developed, the difference being that both drives are years apart and completely different make, size, etc.

Basically I have a 1.5TB drive which, as I was filling up and have been constantly adding to over time, started giving some strange hanging when accessing files.
Turns out I've essentially finally reached the area on the drive where the media defect exists - luckily though as I use SpeedFan for temp monitoring it showed the drive fitness instantly drop from nearly 100% to 0%. Seatools later confirmed bad media.

My 2nd hard drive is 250GB Maxtor SATA (yep, that old, but I payed a lot for it back in the day so I'm running it until it dies - i.e. now), and during my backing up data from the 1.5TB on to the 250GB drive, that also dropped its fitness down to 0%. Another go with Seatools on this drive also confirmed bad blocks (but luckily effecting some pretty redundant data).

Point is, it's impossible to know when the real issue with either drive really happened (suspect in both cases its over time, especially the 250GB drive) as its not until you use the effected area that you get alerted to the problem.

 

[murphyc]

Copy the data to a recently zero'd (or ATA Secure Erased) disk. The data being recovered from marginally bad sectors will eventually be unrecoverable. Additional sectors will likely become bad. Either RMA the disk and get a new one under warranty, or after copying it to another drive, zero the drive or Secure Erase it. In the course of writing zeros to the disk, the firmware will remove bad sectors from use.