Need advice on possible bad harddrive - WD RMA

B

Bryson

Weaksauce
Joined
May 30, 2007
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To make a long story short I was having lots of problems with my main 1tb WD caviar black drive. My main OS partition got corrupted and refused to boot into windows. I originally had 9 pending bad sectors then after running HDD regenerator I had 9 uncorrectable bad sectors and after running WD DLG I now have 4 uncorrectable bad sectors. I need to note that before running HDD regenerator WD DLG completely failed the tests so as a precaution I also changed ports and sata cables and have been running with the drive for the past few days.

Here is the complication. I applied for an advanced RMA because I was convinced the drive was bad and I was lured by the prospect of getting a newer drive with 64megs cache and 500gigs/platter. Miy drive is old and only has 32megs cache. I have not even opened the box yet because I have also read of people getting refurbs that break down a couple of months later.

Thing is I need all my sata ports so how do I know if my sata port is bad, or cable or harddrive? Should I go ahead and open the box or send it back to WD?
 
As far as I know the SMART data logging is handled entirely by the hard drive, so if any bad sectors are reported the cause can be isolated to the device itself. A malfunction of the sata cable or port wouldn't show up there.

If it were me I wouldn't worry too much about it. If I went to the trouble of requesting an RMA drive I'd go ahead and use it. You've already established that your old drive is unreliable. If you're worried about data loss the solution is to make a backup, not agonize over when your drive is going to fail.
 
Yeah if it was a bad cable it won't show up as bad sectors. It would probably show up under something like

199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count
 
Thanks for the responses. The thing I find weird is how come the drive didn't re-allocate the bad sectors and how come it went from 9 to 4? Is it possible that they were just logical bad sectors and that a format could get rid of them? The drive runs really hot too. The day it crashed it was hitting 57 degrees with the case open. Could that be a sign of some kind of malfunction? I also lost power a couple of weeks ago so I am wondering if that hard a part to play or if this is just a fluke. I will open the drive box now and see what drive I got. I have heard of some people getting lucky with a new drive. *crosses fingers*
 
57 degrees celsius!

That's crazy hot for a harddrive.

There could be an internal wiring short that is heating up the drive and causing performance issues.

I like to use Crystal Disk Info for my SMART data, it's simple and has good drive support http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

Might want to give that a try and see if it reports the same information as the WD tool
 
Ya it is hot but it is within spec which is between 30-60 degrees. I agree about Crystal Disk Info. I love that program.

Anyways the drive I got is indeed refurbished. My drive has 28,000 hours and the refurb one has 23,000 but the rest of the Smart data has been reset. I cloned my drive onto the new one and running side by side the refurb runs almost 10 degrees cooler. My 500gb caviar black drive also runs pretty hot. I wonder if dust build up has anything to do with it? I read that there is a small filtered hole in the HDD and I'm wondering if it might be blocked?
 
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