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Hard Disk Failure: read-error timeouts take too long

I have a failing hard disk (Hitachi HDT721032SLA380 - 320G, SATA). I know there are 3000 or more sectors that error on reading.
I'm running ntfsclone --rescue on Linux to make a copy (to a file on an external hard disk), but it reads in 512byte chunks and takes 30 seconds to timeout on each failure. (From what I can see, the errors are in 4096 byte chunks, so it actually fails 8 times (4 minutes) for each failing chunk.)

I've tried changing /sys/block/sda/device/timeout from 30 to 5 but that hasn't speeded anything up (should it?)

Does anyone know a way to reduce the timeout with or without stopping ntfsclone?
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nobus
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I appreciate the your comment.

Right now, this is a non-cost project, but I may give HDD Regenerator a trial later.
I'm also keen to see which files are potentially corrupted, which ntfsclone is doing (slowly!)
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Thanks, dlethe,

It's nice to know there's no free lunch.

This is a home PC rather than an enterprise system (so no RAID, no expensive disks, no backups(!)). But lost data is sad rather than catastrophic.

Given that I've completed a full copy with dd_rescue, the ntfsclone is additional on the failed partition with the failures, and I'm as interested in the listed "Can't read sector at nnnnn" as in the actual data it recovers.
dd_rescue let me specify the minimum block size which meant only one delay per failing group-of-8-clusters. ntfsclone doesn't, and is doing 512 bytes at a time.
Thanks guys for your thoughts.

The ntfsclone failed (returning 100s of errors per second) so I abandoned it.
The dd_rescue I had previously run seems to have worked, so alls well.