Hello,

A few days ago I installed a new Seagate 2TB drive (ST2000DM001), however have been having problems with it. Whenever I try to copy files to it or install something on it I get problems. The transfer speed drops to 0 and once I click cancel I have to wait for several minutes before it does anything. Usually it's about 500MB into a transfer. I tried installing a Steam game on it and the download kept stopping and eventually just crashed.

I've checked the drive for errors and run Seatools, however no errors are showing. What I have been able to find is a SMART setting called 'CRC interface errors' which keeps increasing whenever I use the drive. From Googling I've found that apparently this is due to either a faulty cable, faulty motherboard or faulty disk controller. I've changed the cable and the port on the motherboard and neither of those has made a difference (which I expected, since this is a replacement for a smaller drive and that's been working fine for years. If I put that drive back the issue goes away, and the equivalent SMART result on that is 35 (and doesn't appear to be changing), whereas the value for the problematic drive currently sits around 25,000.

I've contacted Seagate support and they're spinning the line that since it passed the Seatools tests it must be fine, and that it's something that I've done wrong. I've given them the SMART information but in their replies they're just disregarding it, and haven't made any reference to it at all in their replies. Their last suggestion was to run chkdsk (which I've done already) and format it with NTFS, which I've done twice already. I haven't done a full format as whilst I did try, after 5 hours it had reached 1% done, so it's not really practical.

I'd never claim to be a hard disk expert, but based on what I've done so far I can't see that it's something that I've done wrong, so can anyone please advise what I can try next? I'm more than happy for someone to tell me that I'm completely misunderstanding things and give me some more ideas, I just want it to work!

Thanks in advance!

Bertie, which mode - Native SATA, IDE or RAID; any changes?
Does the MoBo supports SATA-3? (latest BIOS or BIOS reset might help sometimes)
Are you using SATA-3 cable? (although seemingly identical, it appeared my branded ASUS SATA-2 didn't work fine with SATA-3)
How did you partitioned the HDD (which tool and size, e.g. NTFS 64GB for OS + ...)
Is the PU (power unit) and its cables ok?
What is your primary HDD (system), SATA-3?
. . .

Shortly, first I'd rather check it in a different PC or in a different mode (IDE/USB).

Cheers.

Thanks for the reply:

- SATA drive, no raid
- Motherboard only supports SATA 2
- I'm using a SATA 2 cable, same one that the previous disk did
- Disk is a single partition from a quick format in Windows
- Power is fine, I changed the power cable as well just in case (although again it was fine with the previous drive)
- Primary HDD is a crucial SSD running in SATA 2

I've been toying with the idea of a new pc for ages, so I've decided to bite the bullet and get one. Firstly because I get a new pc and secondly it'll allow me to rule out the motherboard as a problem with this new drive!