Morning all, just thought I'd get your opinions on this hard drive which is in my work/office PC and has started giving trouble recently. It's an older Velociraptor - the 3000GLFS model. First of all, here's the CrystalDiskInfo readout for it: As you can see, it's got a lot of power on hours and a lot of spin up counts, but no errors to speak of. It has, however, been giving a lot of trouble lately. Here are some symptoms: - Clicking loudly before and after read or write operations. - Takes a long time to spin up when I try to perform reads/writes (it's a secondary disk so spins down when inactive for a while). - Read and write times are very slow compared to what they used to be. - Sometimes does not appear in Windows explorer when computer starts, or disappears after a while. - Programs that are installed on the drive or have operating files stored on this drive have started throwing errors (iTunes throws "Library file cannot be read" etc, Steam does not start, throwing registry errors etc). - Windows often disk checks this drive upon computer startup. What do you think? Is it time to get rid of this, or might a format do it some good? I'm backing up everything that's on it to the server as I type this. If it's time for it to go, I might order one of the new 600GB Velociraptors to replace it with. Thanks for reading.
Given that you have had a couple of UltraDMA CRC errors, it may be worth checking the cabling and verifying that the drive is still using the highest DMA setting in Device Manager (repeated CRC errors will cause it to drop to a slower DMA mode or even PIO mode which may explain the poor performance you report).
I've had a look at the cabling, everything seems to be fine but there's every possibility that something has been loose at some point because I sometimes run this machine with the back panel off (which holds the cabling in place) and it could have gotten loose at some stage. Just to be sure it wasn't this, I changed the cable to a brand new locking SATA cable last night, and double checked the power connection. The DMA setting in the drive channel properties is set to 5 at the moment, so it hasn't dropped. @ Greg - this is usually my thinking as well, but in this case I am not 100% certain. I think something else might be involved.
Yeah it's already backed up, did it as soon as I got a quiet couple of hours on the network. It's usually a loud drive anyway, it does click in normal use, just not usually as loud or as frequently.
