Faulty WD hard drive ??

Garyj881

Garyj881

Garyj881

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Is my hard drive faulty?

When running some tests with HD Tune it found an error on my WD 500gb drive, it said I had 1375 communication errors and that the problem could be a faulty cable, see below pic.

hdtune.jpg


I then swapped the cables round with the other drives in my system and I got the same error, so then I tried Western Digitals Lifeguard and ran the extended test but came up clean, I have removed all data from the drive just incaseit is faulty.

EXTtest.jpg


Is my hard drive faulty?
 
It means that there are communication errors over the sata interface that are detected using the accompanying crc data (so no actual data corruption on the disk). It could be a problem with the hdd, sata controller or (most likely) the cable.

IIUC, the disk keeps count of these through it's lifetime, so even if you fix the problem then hdtune is likely to keep reporting the same warning if it's simply saying that there are 'more than x' of these events.

So I'd try swapping cables again but this time looking for increases in the number of crc errors (1375 so far) before and after you've created some decent disk activity. If that doesn't work, try swapping the disk to another sata port and see what happens.
 
Well I did buy three new cables after the swapping about and the error is still there, maybe should have said that in the first place, It isn't the cable.

So Wonko if I'm reaing you correcly, then I maybe could have had a faulty cable in the past?? If the errors don't increase it due to the information being recorded while having the old cable?

So I will be fine to store data on it and just keep an eye on it, is there any way to fore-remove them errors?
 
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Hi Gary, yes it could have been caused by something that is no longer a problem. As long as the count isn't increasing and there are no other symptoms I wouldn't be worried about it. Just make sure you keep backups of your data (as I'm sure you're doing anyway ;))
I've actually got a couple of WD drives with a similar (static) crc count and I never really sorted out the exact cause. I'm not aware of any way to reset the count to zero, if that's what you're asking.
 
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