Is this hard drive faulty or not?

[Lee James]

I bought a Seagate Barracuda from an online shop and had a few problems with it (nothing to do with OC at all). The problems SEEM to have gone away, but what happened really made me nervous and I'm thinking of sending it back anyway? I wonder what you guys would do?

When I first hooked it up and formatted it, the drive was very slow and unresponsive and took ages just to format. Then I tried copying 1.5 gig of test data to it and it took 10+ minutes (would normally be a few seconds)! Then I tried copying 20 gig and it estimated 3+ hours!

Then I tried accessing the files I had copied onto it and some of them didn't open. Other files, I tried deleting, and they wouldn't delete.

Soon after, my system ground to a halt (including system sounds stuttering and Windows recommending I turn off Aero to speed up performance) - this has never happened to my computer before! Is this a sign of a faulty disk drive?

Then I tried shutting down, but it hung. I eventually got it to shut down, so I booted with the drive disconnected, to test, and everything was 100% fine as normal. Then I tried hooking up the drive again and this time it made a lot of horrible noise, and the BIOS didn't recognise the drive.

I unplugged, let everything cool down, reconnected and this time the drive seemed to work OK.

The drive STILL seems to be working OK. So maybe the problems were just "teething problems"? But what happened has really made me nervous. I don't like the idea of sending stuff back that "seems" to be working, but I wonder what you would do?

 

[w1ze1]

I had a newish Maxtor years ago that started to get really slow, Windows would take 5-10mins to boot and everything lagged.

I ran SiSoftware Sandra software and could see the Read or/and Write Cache was disabled, now you cannot do this even with the Maxtor Floppy Apps at that time so it had died.

The RMA replacement was fine so that was the issue for me.

 

[Steampunk]

I bought a Seagate Barracuda from an online shop and had a few problems with it (nothing to do with OC at all). The problems SEEM to have gone away, but what happened really made me nervous and I'm thinking of sending it back anyway? I wonder what you guys would do?

I'd download Seagate's SeaTools and run diagnostics. Before you could send it back, Seagate would ask you to do that anyway. Other tools such as HDtune and HD sentinel can also do clever surface tests and the like to tell you if something was up with the drive.

 

[seagate_surfer]

^ what Steampunk said.

Sorry to hear you're having trouble. Definitely wanna give our free diagnostic software SeaTools a scan to check on the health of the drive. The test you're going to want to run is Long Generic. The shorter tests choose sectors to test at random, the Long Generic is more thorough. It takes longer, but in your case it's definitely worth it.

If you do decide you want to look into warranty information, you can find our Warranty Validation Tool here.

If you need to get in touch directly, here is a link for Seagate Support as well.