Hard drive failing, time to replace?

[goatsface]

Hi all!!!

To make a long story short, I was being spammed by BSODS and lockups on my primary HDD, and in the end I decided to back it up to my external and retreat to my backup drive. FYI, the BSOD's were 'Kernal-power' errors. I also noticed a massive slow down.

In the end I cloned my back up HDD to my primary HDD, and have run some HDTunes tests on the primary HDD since.

Although no errors in windows yet, the HDtune graph is very erratic, the timeline trail nosedives all over the place. My lowest read speed is about 19/ms whereas my highest is 147mbs. Also SMART is reporting C7 count 1 (Ultra DMA CRC error) In comparison, on my back up hdd the timeline trail is very smooth starting from the start to the end of the drive. I've switched SATA cables between HD's I still get the DMA CRC error on SMART.

P.S I've also tried CHDSK, and a whole lotta utilties on HDTune (surface scan) and boot CD with no errors or bad sectors on disk.

P.S.S It's also worth mentioned that on Speedfan's SMART utility, health is reported as OK but performance is only 17%, with throughput being the major cause ?

Is the ship sinking?
Thanks!

Samsung HD502HJ (primary)
HDS728080PLA380 (backup)
Windows 7 64b pro
AMD Phenon 945 x4
4 gb Corsair DDR 2
Geforce GT 9600 512mb
Gigabyte AM2+ M-720 US3

[seed.helper]

can you please install HDsentinel professional for windows ?
yeah its seems that you HD is full of bad sectors

[goatsface]

No problems found on HDSentienl Pro, but bad sectors were found on my back up drive. OOps!

Thoughts?

[Vulcan]

Based on your description of the HDTune throughput graph (I guess that's what you mean when you said "timeline trail"), then the Samsung drive likely has problems, as seed.helper said.

Look at the full, raw, SMART data from the Samsung drive (i.e. the full set of values where you saw attribute 0xC7 = 1), and check the number of reallocated sectors, and the number of sectors pending reallocation. You'll see more info on the Wikipedia page on SMART that I referred you to, on your other thread. Significant values in either of those two attributes is bad news. However your ability to RMA a drive may be disputed by some suppliers, until an actual SMART failure is reported.

FYI in future it would help if you supply the actual info which you are looking at (e.g. SMART data, throughput graphs etc.) instead of trying to describe everything in words. For example, just because you think that HDSentinal Pro showed no problems, does not mean that others here would agree, if you showed the actual data e.g. the raw SMART data and graphs from HDTune

[goatsface]

Based on your description of the HDTune throughput graph (I guess that's what you mean when you said "timeline trail"), then the Samsung drive likely has problems, as seed.helper said.

Look at the full, raw, SMART data from the Samsung drive (i.e. the full set of values where you saw attribute 0xC7 = 1), and check the number of reallocated sectors, and the number of sectors pending reallocation. You'll see more info on the Wikipedia page on SMART that I referred you to, on your other thread. Significant values in either of those two attributes is bad news. However your ability to RMA a drive may be disputed by some suppliers, until an actual SMART failure is reported.

FYI in future it would help if you supply the actual info which you are looking at (e.g. SMART data, throughput graphs etc.) instead of trying to describe everything in words. For example, just because you think that HDSentinal Pro showed no problems, does not mean that others here would agree, if you showed the actual data e.g. the raw SMART data and graphs from HDTune

Thank you for devoting yourself to help me here! In response to some of your valuble points, I thought I would upload some graphs of A: SMART results B : Benchmark results.

Once more I would be humbled again if you could share any of your thoughts about the results.

P.S I ran the tests from my backup drive, as opposed to doing the tests in situ. Results appear more repeatable like this.

Attachments

[Vulcan]

Thanks for that data.

Originally you said:

the HDtune graph is very erratic, the timeline trail nosedives all over the place. My lowest read speed is about 19/ms whereas my highest is 147mbs.

The HDTune graph you just supplied does not show "nosedives all over the place" - at least based on my interpretation of what you mean, but we haven't seen that original graph, of course. There's a small dip at around 25GB, but that's the only slight concern I have. The lowest read speed of 73.6 MB/s (at ID) is about half the max read speed of 147.5 MB/s (at OD), as expected.

The SMART data suggests there are no sectors reallocated or pending reallocation, and no other obvious areas of concern.

So in summary, in the data you've just supplied, I see no clear evidence of a problem with that disk drive. If you get different HDTune results, but only when booted from that Samsung disk (assuming all hardware connections stay the same for all tests), I suggest that perhaps the benchmark is being affected by background programs accessing that disk at the same time as the benchmark is running.

I would run the HDTune read benchmark several times in the current configuration, so that you can build confidence that the good result is not just a "fluke".

FYI, although I no longer support Windows (and Windows support is off-topic for this forum), older Windows versions (e.g. Win2k) certainly didn't like having a drive and its clone (i.e. same Windows drive signature), in the same system at the same time. I don't know if Win7 (as you are running) handles that situation better, but I just caution you that your config of having both drives (original & clone) in the same system at the same time, and booting from one of them, concerns me. If you've already checked with a reputable source and this is a supported configuration on Win7, then please ignore this worry

[seed.helper]

Thanks for that data.

Originally you said:

the HDtune graph is very erratic, the timeline trail nosedives all over the place. My lowest read speed is about 19/ms whereas my highest is 147mbs.

The HDTune graph you just supplied does not show "nosedives all over the place" - at least based on my interpretation of what you mean, but we haven't seen that original graph, of course. There's a small dip at around 25GB, but that's the only slight concern I have. The lowest read speed of 73.6 MB/s (at ID) is about half the max read speed of 147.5 MB/s (at OD), as expected.

The SMART data suggests there are no sectors reallocated or pending reallocation, and no other obvious areas of concern.

So in summary, in the data you've just supplied, I see no clear evidence of a problem with that disk drive. If you get different HDTune results, but only when booted from that Samsung disk (assuming all hardware connections stay the same for all tests), I suggest that perhaps the benchmark is being affected by background programs accessing that disk at the same time as the benchmark is running.

I would run the HDTune read benchmark several times in the current configuration, so that you can build confidence that the good result is not just a "fluke".

yeah it seems that the disk is working normaly ....the graph is excelent... you have something acessing your hard drive while is in testing like pclab says

FYI, although I no longer support Windows (and Windows support is off-topic for this forum), older Windows versions (e.g. Win2k) certainly didn't like having a drive and its clone (i.e. same Windows drive signature), in the same system at the same time. I don't know if Win7 (as you are running) handles that situation better, but I just caution you that your config of having both drives (original & clone) in the same system at the same time, and booting from one of them, concerns me. If you've already checked with a reputable source and this is a supported configuration on Win7, then please ignore this worry