Hello everyone,

I recently (2 days ago) bought a new Western Digital 500GB Harddrive - WD5000AAKS
My machine already had a working WD2500AAJS harddrive in it so first thing I have done with the new drive was plug it in in order to get it ready for a fresh windows install (partition+format).
So I plug it in, press the power button, posting begins and then it hangs at the "detecting drives" phase. The new drive, in this time, was making some weird sounds which sounded like spin-downs and spin-ups (maybe restarting?). After a few seconds, I reset the computer which boots up without a hitch, get into Windows, get notified about my new hardware: So all is going well.
First thing I do is to split the disk into 2 partitions via windows' builtin Disk Management. I try copying a fair amount of files (~20GB) from my old harddrive to the new 500GB AAKS and all goes well..

I restart my machine, I install Windows7 on a partition of the new drive, I install my mobo drivers, sound drivers, software etc and copy all the files from the old harddrive.
I wipe the partitions of the old harddrive to make it have only a 250gb and start copying back some of the files on it. The copying went well for about 10-20 seconds then the spin-down/spin-up sounds came back, along with operating system freezes (the OS was on the new drive now). I had to hard-reset my computer and ran into the same problem I ran into first time I've plugged in the 500GB AAKS, so I went to a friend's place with both of my hard drives and tried copying the same files from my new 500GB drive to my old 250GB one and ALL WENT WELL, surprisingly.
I was frustrated, so I copied all my data back to my old 250GB drive, wiped the partitions and formatted the new 500gb drive and ran a CHKDISK /r on it...
After ~1 hour the checkdisk was finished and the only thing that seemed wrong in the report was that "20KB were found in bad sectors".

I came back home, repartitioned and installed the OS on the new WD5000AAKS and suprisingly it's working well (no start-up issues, no spindowns/spinups)
I should mention that I've replaced the S-ATA cable the 500GB drive was plugged in with another one and plugged both harddrives into different S-ATA slots in the mobo.

I've read that the power supply could cause spindowns / spinups...

I will post the SMART values of both my drives. There are some highlights I made on the screenshot: these are the differences that got me (with my basic understanding) a little alarmed.
http://img809.imageshack.us/img809/6322/smartdifferences.jpg

Also my Motherboard is a 4-5 year old "Abit KN9" - http://www.abit.com.tw/page/en/motherboard/motherboard_detail.php?pMODEL_NAME=KN9&fMTYPE=Socket%20AM2

Sorry for this huge block of text but I tried to provide as much info as I could about everything I've done with the new harddrive. So could it be the power-supply ? Should I get my money back? It's working okay now, as I've already stated...
Thanks for reading my question

Alexandru Vasluianu.

FYI, those SMART differences which you highlighted, are not important. You can think of the number 253 in "cooked" SMART values, as meaning "not enough data for the drive to report a meaningful value yet" and so it is quite common to see it for a while, on some SMART attributes of new drives.

Of more interest to me is that SMART attribute hex C5 is showing one pending sector for reallocation. Unfortunately again that could be the start of a problem inside the drive, or caused by external power fluctuations, etc.

Since hard drives rely on good quality power for correct operation, I do not see an easy way for you to prove or disprove power as the source of your issues, using just the info you have given so far. Intermittent problems can be very difficult to troubleshoot.

You asked "should you get your money back" for your new drive - IMHO, from the information given so far, we don't yet know if the new drive is definitely faulty, but I don't know what level of proof is needed for you to return the drive, nor what costs / time are involved, which might be a waste if the drive is not faulty.

There are several different troubleshooting approaches which could be used, depending on how much skill, experience, time, money and extra equipment/parts you have available, so I can't spend time teaching about them all - this is why people employ troubleshooters.

If you want to request some brief suggestions of some of the possible troubleshooting approaches, then ask and you may get some replies from members here.

Thank you for replying, Vulcan!

The only cost involved in returning the harddrive would be the trip to the store and the time waiting for my money back (30 days).
The answer and explanation you have given me are very comforting I will keep an eye on the Value of C5 over time and if necessary come back with info.

Again, thank you for taking up your time with my problem.

Best regards,
Alexandru Vasluianu

You're welcome


So you could decide to return the "new" drive, but it is not certain that the "new" drive which you have now is faulty, without further testing / troubleshooting. There is the possibility that a replacement "new" drive will behave in a similar way, if the real cause is elsewhere (e.g. power supply inside your PC).


SMART attribute hex C5 is not the only one to monitor - I mentioned it because this attribute is the only one with an interesting value now, on the current "new" drive. Another attribute which should be monitored in combination with hex C5, is 05 (reallocated sectors) - but again, that attribute 05 can increase if there are power supply problems, so it is also inconclusive in your case.

Good luck with whatever you decide to do

Thank you, Vulcan