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Something on computer is fubar

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4wd:
Well, I have to say that as far as I can remember this is actually the first HDD I've had go faulty on any machine I've had, including my old Amigas - guess my luck had to run out sometime.  Usually I've upgraded the HDD before the old one has reached its 'your screwed' date.

I plugged it into a PCIe SI-3132 card and while it didn't cause the computer to freeze, the transfer rate dropped to <100kB/s during copying - so it's hitting bad blocks somewhere.

I'm just intrigued they aren't being mapped out.  Wish WDs utility had a low level format option.

EDIT: S.M.A.R.T.s Remapped Sectors Count doesn't indicate anything wrong - maybe I'll have a play with MHDD on it.

cranioscopical:
maybe I'll have a play with MHDD on it
-4wd (January 09, 2010, 08:50 PM)
--- End quote ---
You do that and I'll poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick, then we can compare notes on who had the most fun :)

I remember the slightly smug feeling of never having suffered a hard-drive failure. It was nice while it lasted.

Shades:
You should, in my environment it detected bad HD's where the original software (Windows-based) didn't find any.

Here I discarded the drives...because they were relatively small sized anyway (and by discard I mean: putting them in box with other broken computer gear). However if you're out of guarantee and want to remap or discard the broken sectors, would you mind telling how the drive behaves afterwards?

4wd:
However if you're out of guarantee and want to remap or discard the broken sectors, would you mind telling how the drive behaves afterwards? -Shades (January 09, 2010, 11:14 PM)
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I decided to go with the Low Level Format tool at HDDGuru first rather than diving straight in with MHDD.

At the moment the results seem positive, transferring files to it at about 70-90MB/s.

Interesting to note that S.M.A.R.T. doesn't show any indication of sectors being remapped.  So at the moment I'll let it run with volatile data to see how it goes.

As I said, the drive is only around 3 months old so I'm making a guess that possibly the Conficker virus I caught might have glitched it since the two events were coincident.

EDIT: Over 500GB copied to it and it's still working OK.

@nite_monkey: This may help, (or not), determine if the problem is a specific drive.  Open up the Resource Monitor and switch to the Disk tab, in the Disk Activity pane on the left is a column called Response Time.
With that open, start copying files on both drives but only to the same physical drive. eg. If the whole of one drive is C: and the other is E:, then start copy files from C: -> C: and E: -> E:

I found that the response time for one drive would blow out to 3+ seconds when the system would apparently "freeze", (obviously it was hitting bad sectors at this point), whereas other drives would still have significantly lower response times, (unless the transaction also involved the faulty drive).

It helps if you can minimise OS writes during the test period, eg. disable Pagefile if you have enough memory, stop the indexing service, etc, etc.

f0dder:
I decided to go with the Low Level Format tool at HDDGuru first rather than diving straight in with MHDD.
-4wd (January 10, 2010, 04:10 AM)
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Hmm?

AFAIK there hasn't been such a thing as "low-level format" after MFM drives were phased out... tools claiming to do "low-level format" usually just overwrite every sector with zeroes. Drive capacity is actually somewhat larger than size_of_all_sectors, since there's per-sector error correction and head sync stuff... but unless there's something I haven't been told, you don't have access to that data via ATAPI nor SCSI commands.

Might be possible to reset the bad-sector remap table though, so a "low-level format" could be a combination of that and zero-filling all sectors.

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