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I'm looking for a good mid-tower case with a SATA backplane. I currently have a CM690 which is great, but I really hate having to screw around with opening the right side panel and messing with cables any time I need to plug or unplug a hard drive. Is anyone making these yet? It seems like...

G-List has nothing to do with the controller. Data doesn't get remapped. The LBA of the bad sector is mapped to a new physical address. OP, no, bad sectors won't transfer. You won't get garbage data from them either. Hard drives are designed so that you either get good data or nothing at...

Why screw over Redbox for providing you with cheap and easy entertainment?

This is a known bug in the firmware of that drive. Google Seagate 7200.11 firmware for more info.

Swapping the controller board is not going to work on the majority of reasonably recent hard drives, as each drive has unique firmware info on the board

Once the drive is experiencing the firmware problem, no, you will not be able to see/access it with anything before it is repaired. It also doesn't have anything to do with the controller board. The factory-refurbish technique that is (or is supposed to be) used will wipe the drive, but that's...

You can monitor SMART, specifically values for reallocated sectors or offline UNC sectors. Windows will sometimes mention errors in the event log but it will not bring it to your attention. There are plenty of 3rd party utilities that you can use to set up an alarm though. As far as the...

No, if it was failing SMART that would fail Seatools. What can happen (and has been a big issue with WD drives) is that if the drive's natural error handling takes, say 7 seconds to ECC-recover a sector or decide to remap it but the timeout on the RAID controller is, say 5 seconds then the...

If your hard drive is in the process of failing, spinrite stands a good chance of just making it worse. I would not recommend using it.

Even a regular 5400rpm drive would be a huge improvement over what you have. I'd expect ~80MB/sec transfer from current gen drives.

Probably doing an offline SMART scan, this is completely normal.

In flash drives (basically the same technology) what really becomes the problem IS controller failure (or PCB failure, not uncommon in magnetic HDs also). And because of all of the nifty wear-leveling algorithms spreading your data all over the media, recovering anything from a dead controller...

Sounds like the 7200.11 firmware bug, IMO.

No offense, but ask any real data recovery pro about Scott Moulton, and you'll probably get a big :rolleyes:

Putting it in the freezer only works for very specific problems. If your drive is clicking intermittently it is probably suffering from weak/failing heads. Best to use something like r-studio to grab your one file you're looking for.

Absolutely, but that applies just as much to the post I was responding to.

Strange. Maybe has something to do with AHCI?

This is already essentially the case on all flash storage. Sure, and then you can have 5 year old tech that fails on you, and is more difficult for us to work on, and as a result is much more expensive to recover from.

HDDScan is another good one. It can even check SMART info on some USB/Firewire drives/enclosures (and is freeware).

I've got a handful of the 0GB 7200.11 that I picked up for cheap and then fixed and updated the firmware. They seem to work fine now.

Yes, multiple passes of randomized data is completely unnecessary. Just zerofill them. MHDD will certainly do this, and I guess maybe that's DBAN's quickmode?

Thanks for the inputs. Really I'm looking for something sub-$35 that will be a solid 300-400W PSU that isn't going to explode that I can buy a lot of to refurbish a big stack of computers with. If it was for something for me I would be all over a Corsair but these are going to be given away.

I'm looking for a solid quality PSU somewhere in the 300-400 range. Any suggestions? Optimal price level would be something like under $35.

What? The picture of the drive label is a standard Seagate label that clearly is not what the drive reports itself as.

If you're using Windows, check out getdataback or similar.

check the SMART data, scan it with MHDD or similar

This will also highly depend on the model and manufacturer. Samsung? Sure, sometimes. Western Digital? Forget it, unless you're one-in-a-million lucky.

Any "data recovery" tool that writes back to the drive that it is "recovering" from is absurd, in my opinion. At the VERY LEAST if someone insists on using spinrite or hd regenerator, a full image of the drive should be made first. I think you would find that "any other data recovery...

If it was only a logical bad sector then rewriting it with zeros fixed it. Sometimes the ECC data for the sector just gets corrupted and writing over it makes it happy again.

If they work but just have a bunch of bad sectors there's not much you can do physically to make the sectors magically good again. I'd say best case scenario is just pull an image from them and then work with it, 9 times out of 10 the vast majority of files you care about will be fine. If you...

These are not simply interchangeable. Most drives these days store configuration info and parameters that are unique to the drive on the PCB.

MHDD. It is a DOS program that has a bootable CD.

It came like that.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO Never ever ever ever ever use spinrite on a failing drive! Software like this and HD Regenerator will only cause you to lose your data as it beats the poor sick drive to death... To the OP, if your drive is clicking rhythmically your problem could be with the head(s) or...

MHDD doesn't have the ability to detect most controllers in AHCI mode. Try switching to IDE mode. Once you're in the program, you should see the list of drives it can see. Select one, then you can check the smart attributes with F8, run a scan on the entire disk with F4, and get back to the...

dd for windows. > dd bs=1M if=/dev/zero of=\\.\physicaldrive[whatever]

Because it has the 7200.11 disappearing hard drive firmware bug? Probably firmware SD15? Use something like MHDD to check it out.

Use MHDD or similar program to do a real test.

No, the firmware can't be updated if the drive is not recognized.

Since the 7200.11 firmware issue is triggered sometime when the drive is power cycled, I imagine that people using them in 24/7 setups will see a lot fewer problems (or it will take the problems a lot longer to manifest if the drives are rarely powered off).