Windows reporting hard drive failure

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7 Apr 2004
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Ok heres the story.
At christmas I got a samsung Spinpoint F3, supposed to be pretty fast and should complement the ssd I have the OS on.

Problem is it never really seemed to be performing. I have tried running Modern warfare 2 and l4d2 from both the SSD and the F3. The f3 sometimes took forever to load. Whilst I expected that it would not compare to the shiny Crucial m225, it was dissapointing even compared to the 36GB Raptor and an old 200GB something or other drive .

It got wierder, as the F3 sometimes loaded maps in games really quikc, and other times took a long time. Figured it may be spinning up or something.

Then recently I have noticed that in my replay of Mass Effect I was getting stutter on animations, talking scenes. This in no way can be put down to processor or graphics card which is coping fine with action. So it must be due to loading the conversations, odd since I have 4GB of ram.

Then I heard a windows bong, which usually means something has died and it wasnt the game. It was the error message revealing my F3 was failing and I should back data up. (Clever me I have data saved on 3 other drives, not this one Ironically I hadn't got around to backing up all my data yet, as I was going to put it on the F3, this just has steam and a few games on it.)

I didnt investigate for long but I found the following.
I have a sata connector with clip to secure it, it wasn't in all the way and not securely clipped in. Removed it, repositioned it to a new sata port and made sure I heard the click.
Diskcheck revealed no errors.
Checking the defrag it revealed 49% fragmented.

Odd really odd, its a brand new drive (or supposed to be), only a month old and has at most 80-100GB of data on it, at least what I have put there.

My plan, run the defrag to clean it up, then check loading times in a few games.
Get the reciept from my parents and send it back if its a problem.

Does windows remember though about drive faults like this?, becuase it keeps reminding me on boot up to back up, and I would like to know if the cable was the problem, or if it is the motor?

If anything I think it is likely to be the drive motor going. I haven't seen any problem once data is loaded, it is just loading times.
Does anyone know of any free data recovery software becuase I am suspicious that this drive may have something else on it!
 
It's SMART that is informing Windows of your hard drive's status.

I believe that SMART doesn't reset the status of any errors it encounters, it keeps them permanently logged, so that's probably why you're still being reminded about them when you boot up. You should be able to disable SMART for that drive in the BIOS if it is annoying you but be careful as you'll get no further warnings should your F3 actually be faulty.

I remember when I bought my first SATA drive about three years ago, only it was set to SATA300 speeds which my motherboard didn't like as the drive would fail to boot and I got error messages. I discovered that the drive worked fine when I set the jumper to SATA150 but unfortunately SMART had already recorded all those errors so the drive was forever flagged as not working properly even though it was working fine (Windows XP).
 
Thanks, I will have to test it on loading times, and see if the erratic behaviour remains. What is strange is that computer management seems to refer to the drive as being healthy.

One large defrag coming up I guess, and then lets see what it does.
 
By the way, I've just finished playing Mass Effect on the PC and, ironically, it is also installed on my new Samsung SpinPoint F3 which I bought just before Christmas along with a Crucial M225 SSD to install Windows 7 to!

I noticed the minor stuttering in the dialogue scenes too where a character would appear to jerk slightly while talking but I don't believe that's the fault of the hard drive entirely; it's just the point where the game is loading new data. Short of installing the game to an SSD, I doubt you'll eliminate it entirely on a hard drive no matter how fast it is. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong though.
 
It was doing a bit more than a little jerk last night. I will just have to try it, and reserve saving anything important on it for a while :).
 
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