[anarxaki]

This Seagate drive is driving me nuts!
I took it 3 days ago back to the store, to replace it. They said that first they had to check it. The first short test turned out ok. I explained that the drive seems to be working after beeing a few hours off power supply, so they kept it to check it further. The next day the called me to pick it up, it is ok. They run the long SeaTool test and another program they had. They even run some files and tryied to copy them with no problem.

So what was the problem after all? Noone can tell me. I checked the SATA port with another drive and it's working properlty. I swaped sata and power cables and still no problem. Now I have the Seagate drive connected with it's original cables (the ones I used when the problem appeared) and after a few hours it still works. The SMART, short self diagnostic and short generic test turned out ok.

Can you suggest anything else to check? I want to be 100% sure that the drive won't fail me before I start using it again.

Edited by anarxaki, 12 December 2010 - 03:42 AM.

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I want to be 100% sure that the drive won't fail me before I start using it again.

I do NOT trust any hard drive 100%. They are mechanical beasts with moving parts. Moving parts cause wear. And when they're worn beyond tolerances they physically cannot read/write data reliably. (I.e., they can start destroying data).

Where I work, if we suspect that a hard drive is having a problem, it's copied (if possible) and replaced immediately. Hard drives are cheap.

[SpywareDr]

I want to be 100% sure that the drive won't fail me before I start using it again.

I do NOT trust any hard drive 100%. They are mechanical beasts with moving parts. Moving parts cause wear. And when they're worn beyond tolerances they physically cannot read/write data reliably. (I.e., they can start destroying data).

Where I work, if we suspect that a hard drive is having a problem, it's copied (if possible) and replaced immediately. Hard drives are cheap.

[anarxaki]

Where I work, if we suspect that a hard drive is having a problem, it's copied (if possible) and replaced immediately. Hard drives are cheap.

Yes but it seems to have no problem... Something else is wrong and not the drive itself.

[SpywareDr]

You've tested it with at least one other known-good hard drive and you get the same error(s)?

[anarxaki]

I've tested the SATA port with a WD drive which was tested a few days ago with the WD diagnostic program. No problem occured.
I then run all the SeaTool tests on the Seagate drive. No problem occured as well.
I cannot test the SATA and the power cables because when I tool out the drive I mixed them up and there is no way to know which of all those were used in the first place

But, I don't know if it's of any importance, when I took out the drive and tried to start my computer, I got a few "insert cd" errors and I had to go to BIOS settings and search for connected drives. After that, everything seems to be working perfectly.



Is it possible for a defective drive to give a lot of errors (to be practicly unusable) and after a while to start working?

[SpywareDr]

If the errors were showing up while the drive was in the middle of doing something like reallocating bad sectors, then yes, I suppose it could. (But, I wouldn't trust the drive).

Wikipedia: S.M.A.R.T. > ATA S.M.A.R.T. attributes
http://en.wikipedia....R.T._attributes
See "05 Reallocated Sectors Count"

[anarxaki]

So far the drive is behaving like it has no problem. Just to be sure, I moved any valuable data to testified working drives. Since the diagnostic programs show no errors, I cannot send it back. So I'll be using it until something else comes up and I can use the warranty.

Thanks once again for your time and your information. I've learnt a lot the last days about drives