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Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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Would you RMA my HD502HJ drive?

December 5th, 2011, 17:43

HDTune is reporting Ultra DMA CRC Error Count = 1

I've swapped the SATA cable between my two drives and the result is the same. Therefore, the cable is OK. I'm not sure what's going on but I've been given my RMA number and it's now down to me to ship it off..

or not?

Thanks for taking the time to read and reply to me.

Re: Would you RMA my HD502HJ drive?

December 5th, 2011, 17:57

Are you having any problems with it?

Re: Would you RMA my HD502HJ drive?

December 5th, 2011, 18:16

Yes, sir. I 'was' but I wish I could be 100% on that. Right now it's running OK, but I previously used it as my primary until system freezes and Kernal-power bsod's started happening. If I did manage to boot it was extremely slow.

I had freezes on my back up drive that was until I unplugged the HD502HJ. That's about as conclusive as I could get.

There wernt any software changes that took place that would have explained the above, nor did I install any new hardware. Plain old Win7 64b pro.

So I formatted and cloned back onto it and so far things seem ok, no bad sectors and performance OK but Speedfan's SMART tool reports performance at '17%' although HDTunes bench marks seem to indicate it's running normal (possibly abnormally fast even!) Surface scan OK.

Please advise.
Thank you

Re: Would you RMA my HD502HJ drive?

December 5th, 2011, 18:22

@goatsface:
With your questions here, you are duplicating your other thread:

hard-drive-failing-time-replace-t21332.html

Therefore I'm not going to waste time addressing those duplicated questions here, just answer your original question.

goatsface wrote:HDTune is reporting Ultra DMA CRC Error Count = 1

I've swapped the SATA cable between my two drives and the result is the same.

That's normal. :) That specific SMART attribute is persistent on a drive, so after an interface CRC error has been detected, that counter will always be non-zero. You need to interpret that specific counter by looking for changes, to understand whether there are ongoing issues in that area, or not.

Re: Would you RMA my HD502HJ drive?

December 5th, 2011, 18:45

Vulcan wrote:@goatsface:
With your questions here, you are duplicating your other thread:

hard-drive-failing-time-replace-t21332.html

Therefore I'm not going to waste time addressing those duplicated questions here, just answer your original question.

goatsface wrote:HDTune is reporting Ultra DMA CRC Error Count = 1

I've swapped the SATA cable between my two drives and the result is the same.

That's normal. :) That specific SMART attribute is persistent on a drive, so after an interface CRC error has been detected, that counter will always be non-zero. You need to interpret that specific counter by looking for changes, to understand whether there are ongoing issues in that area, or not.


Thank you for giving up your time to respond and help me.

I somewhat suspected that those values are stored on the hard drive somewhere and represent a historical value (This happened and such etc) as opposed to an actual present value here and now. It might have happened the month after I bought the drive, for instance. I can't tell.

I'm not too concerned myself about this, based on what I understand about this value. However, if you would be concerned, and you think that my logic is flawed, please do say.

But still, to RMA or not to RMA. I don't think I will at this point but if anyone else would, please do say. If I did RMA, it would be tested and even if there is a problem or something dirty under the hood, I don't think it is obvious until it's too late. Might be working great today, totally dead tomorrow for example?!

That's the nature of the beast with these dirty hard drives, correct?

Re: Would you RMA my HD502HJ drive?

December 5th, 2011, 19:32

goatsface wrote:I somewhat suspected that those values are stored on the hard drive somewhere and represent a historical value (This happened and such etc) as opposed to an actual present value here and now.

Some SMART attribute values are persistent; others are not.

I don't understand your point about historical values vs. present value - that terminology is too ambiguous for me to be sure how to respond. I suggest you read the Wikipedia article on SMART to understand more about what the attributes mean.

goatsface wrote:But still, to RMA or not to RMA.

That question is effectively repeating your other ongoing thread, so I'm not going to duplicate effort on that point here. Please don't start multiple threads about one drive problem. I'll put a brief comment in your other thread.
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