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Brand new HDD problem


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Are there any hardware gurus in the house?

 

I had just bought a Western Digital 750GB SATA HDD on Saturday, and have had an intermittend high pitch whine that occurs, kinda like a mini spoolup noise.

It makes access to it freeze for a couple seconds, but other than that data copies fine.

There is no clicking noise, no re-reading of damaged sectors noises or anything.

It will usually happen when I try to access the drive after a long period, does it have a power saving mode or something?

I used WD's hard drive diagnostic, the smart test had passed, the extended test passed.. but when I use the dos version on hiren's boot cd I get an error.

 

DRQ TIMEOUT

 

ERROR/STATUS CODE: 0135

 

It also makes that whining noise again when the dos version test starts.

Hard Disk Sentinel which is also on that CD gave a different error.

 

Smart Error 208

 

Ack, I don't wanna have to send this back.. I just copied a whole bunch of stuff onto it.. took ages..

Can anyone shed some light onto the problem? :unsure

 

Edit:

Hmmm I just ran the Hard Disk Sentinal again and it didn't pickup any errors. :unsure

 

Double Edit:

It appeared again...

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I just tried to play a game on it.. have pauses every minute or so as it gets new data... with that high pitch noise :x

 

Oh and that Hitachi one gives me an instant reboot :(

 

I wish they had seagate in stock at the time... That's the brand I usually get.

 

*sigh* all this effort now to copy back, wipe and drive back after work

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Not 100% sure what the problem is, but I've had similar (but not exactly the same) with quite a few drives, they almost all failed within 12 months. Replace it now before it crashes when it's a real problem later.
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I just tried to play a game on it.. have pauses every minute or so as it gets new data... with that high pitch noise :x

 

Oh and that Hitachi one gives me an instant reboot :(

 

I wish they had seagate in stock at the time... That's the brand I usually get.

 

*sigh* all this effort now to copy back, wipe and drive back after work

 

 

sounds like the drive motor it self is locking up. pretty rare to see it now days with new drives.

 

get rid of it, before it gets rid of your data!:evil

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If you bought it new and its doing this why would you not take it back? It sounds unwell to me, especially the noises. If the drive gives you warning signals from day 1 I wouldnt trust it.

 

From what I know about SMART it really is only a check/compare system. It compares paramters of the drives behavior to a known healthy set. ie spin up speed, spin up time, bearing temperature etc etc. If any of these drift out of the healthy range it fails the test. A new drive probably wont deviate too much from the good settings as the mechanism will be new and may still be in the happy range.

 

The contant pausing might be a problem with the cache ram on the controller card. The whine might be the heads thrashing back and forth reading the same data into bad cache ram over and over again. Just a wild guess but its clearly faulty.

 

 

Unless you have filled the drive with goat porn and your jpeg collection of kittens in bonnets I would take it back.

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w00t finally got a proper working error free drive :D

Man.. wiping the old drive to DoD standards took 50 odd hours >.<

Finally got the chance to take it back on Wednesday after work...

After driving through peek hour traffic + an accident on a major road I get there and they were closed for the day due to some 'computer system issue'.. fckers.. was kinda cut

Couldn't go Thursday cause of uni.. so had to wait till Friday night..

But at least it was all hassle free.. I could've even upgraded to seagate if I wanted.. but they didn't have any in stock yet again...

 

Thanks for all the info and suggestions guys :cool:

Oh and Mikie, funilly enough a work collegue also mentioned the same thing about samsung drives, being quiet and of high quality.. I've never had one myself though

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HDD brands are an interesting topic because it seems to come and go as the generations of hdd's change, ie I once remember Maxtor was king, then Seagate, then Western Digital, now Samsung being recommended?

 

What is the current vibe of GOOD drives out there, or more importantly which are the ones with a SHIT reputation right now? I'm about to go out and buy a couple hdd's tomorrow. Also, what's a reasonable price point right now? ie I never buy at the peak of technology, so is about 250gb the sweet spot? Price?

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I've been happy with both Seagate and Western Digital lately. I had a bad run with Maxtor drives a couple of years ago but before that, they were perfectly fine. One thing that is constant is that excessive heat kills hard drives quickly.

 

On my new home server I installed 4x of the new 500G WD "Green Power" drives. They only draw 6W of power - about half that of the Seagate ones I think. When I soak tested that machine, I did notice that they ran a lot cooler than the older Seagate drives. It had the side effect of lowing the overall PC case temperature which is a good thing seeing it lives in a cupboard! I do have a small 12V fan in there to draw air out of the cupboard 24/7 too.

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Given personal experience I'm not buying a WD drive again. I've had about 90% failure rate of their drives, 18 out of 22 drives, I've had 7 WD drives bought (or as replacements to other failed drives) all fail within 12 months, the remainder were 15 were in machines bought for a client company, 11 of which had HDD failures in the first 18 months. Perhaps I've had a bad run, but it's a damn big enough sample to piss me off, and not use them again.

 

Maxtors, not had a huge problem with, but never been 100% happy with them, noise, or other similar non critical factors ....

 

Segates, are probably my preferred out of these three providers, not had more than a reasonable number of faults with them.

 

As for other brands, like hitachi, IBM, Fujitsu, whatever. I don't recall much, which is probably a good sign as you tend to notice the bad, but I've never singled them out for attention.

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I found this an interesting read about drives:

 

http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf

 

Helped me think more about HDDs, and not just accept the 'myths' around running 'em.

 

Fascinating stuff, if you are into that kind of thing...

 

Every brand of drive I have known has had poor batches. I swear I'll never buy brand X again, only to find a year or so down the track that brand Y now has a bad batch of drives... and everyone is recommending brand X again......

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