What's Wrong With My HDD?

InKursion

InKursion

InKursion

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Joined
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Hi all,

Recently the main HDD in my OCuK system (Western Digital 500Gb SATA2) has been intermittently clicking and making unusual 'loading' noises when under stress. Nothing really worrying audibly (i.e. screeching, squealing, jarring noises etc.)- but the constant clicking noise is something that I haven't had with previous hard-drives before. After reading a few 'CLICKING = HARD-DRIVE FAILURE!' posts on the trusty Internet... I ran a 'benchmark', and got some very worrying results :(.

After looking at the consistent graphs displayed on the 'HDD Benchmarks' thread, I was extremely dismayed to see the performance of my 'main' storage. If this badboy fails, I stand to lose over 200Gb of media, as well as lots of work and important documents. What's your diagnosis, hard-drive experts?

hddfailurerr9.jpg


If the outlook is bad, then what steps can I take to RMA or fix this? I bought the full system from OCuK only 3-4 months ago, and cannot believe that it is even considering fainting on me this early. The temperatures are very respectable- 24 Degrees average.
 
InKursion said:
If this badboy fails, I stand to lose over 200Gb of media, as well as lots of work and important documents. What's your diagnosis, hard-drive experts?
Click to expand...
Back it up for a start (although you should be doing that as a matter of course anyway).

Looking at the HDTune trace and your description of the symptoms it's fairly clear that the drive is on the way out.

InKursion said:
I bought the full system from OCuK only 3-4 months ago, and cannot believe that it is even considering fainting on me this early.
Click to expand...
HDDs are extremely delicate mechanical instruments. Unfortunatley they can fail, it's jsut a fact of life that you need to be aware of and prepared for.

The first step is to get WD's diagnostic program from their website (there should be a link in the sticky at the top of the forum), run the long test with that and see what it says. The first thing WD will ask for if you RMA the drive is the output from the diags.

RMAing however may not be as simple as sending the drive to WD since it's from a pre-built system, I'd drop a quick webnote to OCUK and see who they suggest the RMA should be directed to.
 
rpstewart said:
Back it up for a start (although you should be doing that as a matter of course anyway).

Looking at the HDTune trace and your description of the symptoms it's fairly clear that the drive is on the way out.


HDDs are extremely delicate mechanical instruments. Unfortunatley they can fail, it's jsut a fact of life that you need to be aware of and prepared for.

The first step is to get WD's diagnostic program from their website (there should be a link in the sticky at the top of the forum), run the long test with that and see what it says. The first thing WD will ask for if you RMA the drive is the output from the diags.

RMAing however may not be as simple as sending the drive to WD since it's from a pre-built system, I'd drop a quick webnote to OCUK and see who they suggest the RMA should be directed to.
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot for the useful response,

Which program would you recommend best for 'backing up' entire hard-drive partitions? This particular WD500Gb hard-drive has two partitions on it: a Windows XP 32-bit and a Vista Ultimate 64-bit. Would this cause any problems with the backing up, or would it all just copy over flawlessly? I can get another internal SATA2 drive no problem, it's just knowing how to go about the process- that's all :P.

I'll contact WD / OCuK now, thanks again.
 
Acronis True Image is your best bet for image type backups - take one of each partition and then restore them onto the new disk in the same order. Hopefully everything should just work.
 
Thanks very much for the recommendation :).

I've conducted several chkdsk's, as well as some intensive 'sector tests, and all of the sectors appear to be healthy (by the SMART criteria test at least). However the clicking noise is rather abnormal, and well... the benchmark tests above display it all.

On the WD website, it asks for a reason for requesting an RMA. Which reason would suffice? Seeing as the hard-drive hasn't actually technically failed yet, and there are no damaged/bad sectors- the only true reason I have is a sound that hints towards a bad omen :p.
 
Left it running their extended tests overnight (was estimated to take 4 hours, and 4 hours of no-computer use during the daytime is a near-impossibility for me with my work)- and it turned up as 'healthy', with no causes for alarm.

However, the noise does still occasionally persist... very sporadic it seems... and the HD Tune scans do still return the same very erratic and inconsistent results. Any ideas?
 
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