Worst HD benchmark ever?

schumi84

schumi84

schumi84

Soldato
Joined
5 Sep 2006
Posts
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Location
West Ewell, Surrey
Hi there, a couple of you may have seen a few of my posts beforehand in the case and overclocking section regarding the problems i have been having overclocking.

For those that dont know the issue, basically when i run Prime95 it runs for a period of time and then the pc either grinds to a halt or it just restarts the pc, and loses the hard drive. When either of these happen it doesnt fail any of the cores in Prime95.

Well i have just had an issue just booting into windows, i tried different SATA cables and different ports on the mobo and still had problems.

When i eventually got in i thought i would run HDTune to see what was happening. When i ran the error check on the drive it froze (sound familiar?). When i eventually got back in again, i ran the benchmark and got this result:



Am not particuarly happy with that. If i was to RMA the drive, would that screenshot be good enough evidence or would i need to run the Seagate driver diagnostic tool as well?
 
Personally, I would try the following:

1. Run eventvwr and see if there is any obvious problems relating to hard disks or atapi devices.
2. Run a chkdsk c: /r (start, run, cmd in xp) which will scan your drive for any errors (orphaned files etc)
3. Make sure you have nothing running in the background that could be stealing cpu usage etc.

I'd then re-bench. If problem still persists, I'm pretty sure you need to run the s/w diagnostics before you fill out an RMA (at least you do with Maxtor and Western Digital in my experience)
 
I didnt know they made 160gb floppy diskettes!
Id pull that drive and run it as a slave and test it again. That boy aint right.
 
Use the SeaTools diagnostics package. Hatching a guess, the drive head has become defective. SeaTools will pick up on that and then you will defo get it replaced (if it is still within its warranty period)
 
Hi there, thanks very much for all your replies, has been very helpful.

Have just managed to reinstall windows on a spare Hitachi drive i had. I downloaded the seatools diagnostic utility to see if there were any errors. It says that the short and long drive tests are not available on that drive, though i can run the short and long generic options (whatever they are).

Interestingly, dont know whether this is important, but i can do the short and long tests on the Hitachi drive and my RAID drives (they are Seagate) and and they both fail the tests.

Even just having the dodgy drive plugged in as a slave, the computer seems to 'lose' the drive and it completely locks up my pc and upon a forced restart it doesnt detect the drive.

Any further help would be appreciated :D
 
First off, I'm wondering if you have a dodgy motherboard or SATA controller. Do you have another machine with SATA ports that you can run HD Tune on? If so, run it on that drive.

If the drive seems fine on the other machine, then I'd start guessing something is either misconfigured or dying on your machine. Even so, run SeaTools under DOS mode, on the machine with the hopefully good SATA port.
 
I am hoping that it isnt the motherboard. The drive that is faulty is running via the ICH8R controller, along with with my RAID0 array (2 disks) and my DVD drive. Just running a HDTune benchmark on my RAID 0 so will post results shortly. Will also run a bench with my replacement Windows drive.

/Edit

Here are the other benchmarks for my other drives: (the Hitachi drive is only SATA 1)

RAID Drives


Hitachi (windows) Drive
 
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Those two benchmarks look fine, the RAID one is perhaps a touch slow but that's more likely either the caching not being on or the drives themselves being older ones.
 
Cheers for that rpstewart, the drives themselves are relatively new (about a year old). As i have them on the ICH8R i had a look at the Intel Storage Manager software and saw that write back caching wasnt enabled. I enabled it and got this new benchmark:



Wierdly though the minimum is less than what it was when write back caching was disabled, is this normal?
 
Quick update.

I downloaded the DOS Seatools program and ran that. Even though my pc picked up the dodgy drive upon starting up, once Seatools DOS had loaded it couldnt see it, though wierdly it picked up my Hitachi drive.

Would you say that the drive is definitely faulty and i should RMA?
 
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