Hard Drive Failure?

[mks2005]

Hi

I recently noticed things were taking a while to load. I decided to benchmark my HD (a WDC 5000AAKS) to see if it was indeed slow. I was right to be suspicious. When testing with HD Tach, the Burst Test, CPU Test and Random Access Test seemed to go fairly fast, until reaching fourth one (not sure what it is).

Burst speed shows 4.0Mb/s, average read 3.7Mb/s, Random access; 50.2ms

So I'm thinking what the hell. I restarted and ran the test again. Burst speed was 200Mb/s, average read around 60Mb/s or so I think. Normal, I guess.

Some additional symptoms include: noticed stuttering and sometimes actually crashing, in games recently. Thought this might be down to heat but temps seem fine... more recently still... PC seemed to take ages on windows loading screen. Not good.

So what's the deal here. Is my drive borked? It's pretty new (about 2 months old). If this is definitely the case, does anyone know where I stand when it comes to getting replacements? Not sure if it's under warranty or not (guessing it's not)...

 

[mks2005]

Thanks.

Intruigingly, I ran a SeaTools long diagnostic test on the drive which it passed.

I've just opened the System Error Log. Oh dear. This doesn't look too pretty.

 

[mks2005]

Running WD's diagnostic tool now. I will check it when I get home.

I'm hoping you're right about the cabling causing it. I did check that the SATA cable was secure though, and it seemed to be. It would make sense if the cable is dodgey I guess, seeing as the drive itself passed the first diagnostic test. Hmm, hope I have a spare SATA cable around.

Cheers for the advice.

 

[mks2005]

Gah. The WD diagnostic tool had been going 9 hours and still nowhere near finished!?

I tried replacing the SATA cable and I'm still getting errors in event viewer and stuttering in games.

Time to RMA?


Edit: It passes the Quick Test with no issues though.. I'm confused.

 

[mks2005]

Estimated time to complete the test: 32 hours remaining. (That's after its been running overnight.) This can't be right, can it?

 

[mks2005]

Thanks guys I will try both those suggestions. Would be nice if checkdisk could solve my issues.

 

[mks2005]

I've installed a new, identical hard drive and cloned my existing disk across to it.

Will someone please explain this:

Old Drive - Not Booted From

New Drive - Booted From

New Drive - Not Booted From

Old Drive - Booted From

Is this normal?

 

[mks2005]

Checkdisk reports no errors so it seems.

Is it normal for the boot drive to benchmark like that?

Strangely I'm not experiencing any more errors in event viewer now....