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Hard Drive Failure?


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#1
naza

naza

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I got a problem in trying to work out for sure if my hard drive is
failing. Problems began a few weeks ago when the 160GB Maxtor Drive
began to make a sort of grinding noise. Just to help you out a bit,
its the sound that happens after the three clicks in the sound clip.

http://www.thenetwor...ad_damage 2.wav

There was not as such clicking, but just a loud sound. I know in
normal operation drives do make this sound, but this was much louder.
Anyway, I did a defrag of the had drive and it went away. Today it
came back, I straight away got all my data of the drive. During which
it made the sound not all the time but at some files, sounded rather
random. I left the data on the drive and did a disk check in DOS. At
the stage 2(Verifying Indexes) it made the sound at around 30% and
80%, everytime( I repeated the check a good few times). So then I wipe
and formatted the disk again. Ran the Seatools Program and did all the
tests, it passed all of them. So now I put some data on the drive and
do the the same check on the disk. I can hear the sound but I would
say that would be normal operation. HDD Life reports 55% Health, with
all SMART Tools reporting everything is fine.
Pasting the SMART info was messy, so I upped a SS.

Posted Image

The HDD was brought in February so still in warranty made by Seagate
although branded Maxtor. I now cannot get it to make the sounds as it
did before, I have done benchmarks and read/writes test's practically
for the last 4 hours, but all seems fine.

So was the sort of sound I am reporting just due to messed up file
system, which was messing with the head? I did do many full chkdsk's
with the data, before the wipe, I want to be fairly sure there is a
problem before sending the drive away and wasting money, if they claim
there is no fault.

Thanks for your help.
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#2
naza

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Just to answer my own question, it was and now is no longer working. The PCB just got fried on the thing as soon as I turned on the PC.
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#3
phillip22

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Just shows you can't rely on what maker's diagnostics software tells you, and in fact most of the big PC builders (Packard bell etc.) don't accept
those results either when you request a replacement under warranty. They usually ask you to run a modified format command on it which is a much more accurate and reliable test.
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