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Ghastlyone
Premium Member
join:2009-01-07
Nashville, TN

Ghastlyone

Premium Member

Repair or Replace Disk Warning on Brand New WD Caviar Black.

Hopefully you guys will have some input on the issue I had come up last night.

This is on a brand new PC build...

i5 3570k
Gigabyte Z77 UD5H
16gb Corsair Vengence Blue
OCZ Vertex 4 128gb (boot drive)
Western Digital Caviar Black 1tb HDD
Windows 7 64bit

So last night I got a "Repair or Replace Hard Disk" warning from Windows 7 regarding my Western Digital HDD.

It said to backup immediately and proceed to shutdown.

I did run Western Digital's Lifeguard Diagnostics Tool and got a failed status on "Raw Read Error Rate"

What do you guys think? RMA this thing back?

Thanks for any help.
Ghastlyone

Ghastlyone

Premium Member

This isn't my exact scan, I pulled this from the internet, but my failed status was exactly the same as this one....

Kilroy
MVM
join:2002-11-21
Saint Paul, MN

Kilroy to Ghastlyone

MVM

to Ghastlyone
Electronics failures, if they are going to fail, are normally in the first 90 days. So, yes, back it up and RMA.

Camelot One
MVM
join:2001-11-21
Bloomington, IN

Camelot One to Ghastlyone

MVM

to Ghastlyone
Yes, absolutely RMA it.

Ghastlyone
Premium Member
join:2009-01-07
Nashville, TN

Ghastlyone

Premium Member

Thanks for the quick responses guys.

I submitted the RMA through Western's website. Hopefully it doesn't take 3 weeks to get.

Regarding backup. Should I even bother? The only things I have installed on this HDD is Steam and Origin with a couple games (so far). And some other misc software like EVGA Precision, CPUID, etc. That's it.

Camelot One
MVM
join:2001-11-21
Bloomington, IN

Camelot One

MVM

I wouldn't bother with it. Too much potential for file corruption, and you could spend weeks tracking down why something isn't running right.

koitsu
MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
Humax BGW320-500

koitsu to Ghastlyone

MVM

to Ghastlyone
Firstly: the software you're using to monitor your drive is significantly outdated and contains bugs. Please consider using HD Tune Pro (trial version is fine). I'm not here to "advertise" for the product, but I cannot stress how old/blah 2.55 is.

Secondly: you claim you have a "Western Digital Caviar Black 1tb HDD". That is not what you're showing in your screenshot. What you've shown in your screenshot is a Western Digital Raptor 150GB drive, model WD1500ADFD. This drive is is almost 6 years old.

If you bought this drive from someone who claimed it was a WD Caviar Black 1TB drive, you got ripped off.

Would you care to tell us what's really going on here? You need to be very, very precise when you report problems of this nature. For all I know, now you're going to RMA the wrong drive to WD and follow up with "THE RMA SOLVED NOTHING!". Understand?

Thirdly: the "FAILED" warning you see simply indicates the drive at one time in its life has actually had the SMART attribute 0x01 drop BENEATH the "Threshold" value. Currently the value is at 100 ("Current"), but during its lifetime, the drive actually dropped to a value of 1 ("Worst"). The "Threshold" trip point is 51. The thresholds are chosen by Western Digital.

I can tell you right now that the reason your raw read error rate dropped to that value at one time is almost certainly because of what's shown in SMART attribute 0xC5. You have 2 sectors which are "suspect"; reading them would directly affect SMART attribute 0x01.

Furthermore, SMART attribute 0xC7 indicates you have something seriously bad going on with either your SATA cables or your SATA ports. That drive itself shows a total power-on hours count of 378 hours, yet it has already experienced 1591 CRC errors.

Thus I recommend you do ALL OF THESE THINGS:

1. Replace your SATA cables
2. Replace the drive
3. Make sure that there is no dust/debris in your SATA ports on your motherboard; canned air will greatly help you here.

If after this you continue to see SMART attribute 0xC7 incrementing, you either continue to have bad SATA cables, you have a motherboard that has a very bad southbridge, or there is serious EMI/electronic noise interfering with data transfer on your system. I have no way to determine the root cause for this, so usually what I tell people to do is replace their motherboard in this case.

Camelot One
MVM
join:2001-11-21
Bloomington, IN

Camelot One

MVM

said by koitsu:

Secondly: you claim you have a "Western Digital Caviar Black 1tb HDD". That is not what you're showing in your screenshot. What you've shown in your screenshot is a Western Digital Raptor 150GB drive, model WD1500ADFD. This drive is is almost 6 years old.

Good catch!

Ghastlyone
Premium Member
join:2009-01-07
Nashville, TN

Ghastlyone

Premium Member

said by koitsu:

Firstly: the software you're using to monitor your drive is significantly outdated and contains bugs. Please consider using HD Tune Pro (trial version is fine). I'm not here to "advertise" for the product, but I cannot stress how old/blah 2.55 is.

I stated in the OP that I used WD's Lifeguard Diagnostic software.
said by koitsu:

Secondly: you claim you have a "Western Digital Caviar Black 1tb HDD". That is not what you're showing in your screenshot. What you've shown in your screenshot is a Western Digital Raptor 150GB drive, model WD1500ADFD. This drive is is almost 6 years old.

If you bought this drive from someone who claimed it was a WD Caviar Black 1TB drive, you got ripped off.

Would you care to tell us what's really going on here? You need to be very, very precise when you report problems of this nature. For all I know, now you're going to RMA the wrong drive to WD and follow up with "THE RMA SOLVED NOTHING!". Understand?

See my second post in this thread...
said by Ghastlyone :
This isn't my exact scan, I pulled this from the internet
I pulled a quick photo from the internet to simply show what exactly the type error I'm getting.
said by koitsu:

Thirdly: the "FAILED" warning you see simply indicates the drive at one time in its life has actually had the SMART attribute 0x01 drop BENEATH the "Threshold" value. Currently the value is at 100 ("Current"), but during its lifetime, the drive actually dropped to a value of 1 ("Worst"). The "Threshold" trip point is 51. The thresholds are chosen by Western Digital.

I can tell you right now that the reason your raw read error rate dropped to that value at one time is almost certainly because of what's shown in SMART attribute 0xC5. You have 2 sectors which are "suspect"; reading them would directly affect SMART attribute 0x01.

Furthermore, SMART attribute 0xC7 indicates you have something seriously bad going on with either your SATA cables or your SATA ports. That drive itself shows a total power-on hours count of 378 hours, yet it has already experienced 1591 CRC errors.

Thus I recommend you do ALL OF THESE THINGS:

1. Replace your SATA cables
2. Replace the drive
3. Make sure that there is no dust/debris in your SATA ports on your motherboard; canned air will greatly help you here.

If after this you continue to see SMART attribute 0xC7 incrementing, you either continue to have bad SATA cables, you have a motherboard that has a very bad southbridge, or there is serious EMI/electronic noise interfering with data transfer on your system. I have no way to determine the root cause for this, so usually what I tell people to do is replace their motherboard in this case.

My OCZ SSD Boot drive is connected into the same 6Gb/s Sata port as this Western Digital HDD running in AHCI and SMART scan checked the SSD with no errors.

The mother board is brand new (I know that doesn't mean much) but dust isn't an issue at all.

I'm going to RMA this thing and post back with the results. After doing a bunch of reading of reviews on Newegg this evening of these Caviar Black models, it sounds like I'm in the same boat as hundreds of other people

koitsu
MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
Humax BGW320-500

1 edit

koitsu

MVM

I need to see an actual screenshot from the drive in question, not something you found off the Internet. I'm less interested in "what shows up as failed" as I am in the other statistics that can explain the situation. TL;DR version: I, nor anyone else, can help you unless you provide actual screenshots/data for the drive in question. I will be happy to assist (see my many other posts assisting people with hard disks gone bad) once I can get my hands on that.

Secondly, WD Lifeguard Diagnostic is for a couple specific purposes only -- it does not do the same kind of forensics/analysis as a human being. I can read/interpret SMART statistics better than that software, as pompous as that sounds.

My OCZ SSD Boot drive is connected into the same 6Gb/s Sata port as this Western Digital HDD running in AHCI and SMART scan checked the SSD with no errors.

That cannot be the case, since with SATA there is a 1:1 ratio between port and device. E.g. one hard disk/SSD/whatever per port. Unless, of course, you're using an SATA port multiplier, but I strongly doubt that.

If you meant to say "I use port number X with my SSD and it works fine, and I disconnected my SSD and hooked the same port up to the WD MHDD", then that makes more sense, except I don't know why you're doing that -- it means you don't have an OS/debugging environment to do tests in.

Next, I'd love for you to explain what a "SMART scan" means in this context. See my comment above -- I can read/interpret SMART statistics better than software. If you used WD's software to analyse an OCZ SSD, then that was a very, very bad choice on your part.

SMART is not a "binary thing", meaning the situations where an actual SMART attribute trips the overall SMART health status are fairly extreme; hard disk vendors tend to pick absurd threshold points. There can absolutely be a catastrophic problem happening long before the overall SMART health status goes from "OK" to "FAIL". A great example is the screenshot you did provide: SMART attribute 0xC7 indicates something bad going on with that individuals' SATA cables or SATA port, yet the attribute is "OK".

Learning how to read SMART attributes takes time and experience. It's not something you can learn quickly overnight, as every drive model and every vendor implements their stuff differently. Some attributes may make you think something is catastrophically wrong (especially with Seagate disks), when in fact everything is 100% normal. People almost constantly interpret SMART attributes wrong.

So as I said, I need to see actual screenshots from tools like HD Tune Pro (trial is fine), or smartmontools' smartctl -a or smartctl -x output for the Western Digital disk to be able to provide you with a good analysis of what might be causing the problem. I understand you're going to RMA the disk anyway -- and that's fine -- but there may be something going on that's specific to your motherboard or underlying system. You're welcome to provide me to same data for the SSD too if you want me to review that too.

Sorry for sounding argumentative, but you've shown up asking for help with a MHDD, yet did things like "run SMART tests on the SSD" and haven't provided any actual data that folks here like myself can use to help you.

Ghastlyone
Premium Member
join:2009-01-07
Nashville, TN

1 edit

Ghastlyone

Premium Member

Thanks for the reply Koitsu. This is my first build, so some of this is new to me. Been learning a lot of stuff lately.

I plugged the WD back in this morning and did in fact run HD Tune, and these are the results so far. I'm currently in the process of running an Error Scan. I'll let it finish first, but it is showing some "damaged blocks". I'll post that screen shot afterwards.

The benchmark falls way off the map there in a few spots.
Ghastlyone

Ghastlyone

Premium Member

These are the scan results so far...

seaquake
MVM
join:2001-03-23
Millersville, MD

seaquake to Ghastlyone

MVM

to Ghastlyone
I don't know what the hell is going on with WD lately. I had 2 500GB and one 1.5TB drive fail on me within the past few years. The first 500GB was within 45 days of getting it. It's replacement failed less than a year later. The 1.5TB drive failed in about 60 days. The replacement 1.5TB I received was in a completely different enclosure and I've not had any problems with it at all (knock on wood).

I've always been a big WD fan. I've had drives from them that have lasted for nearly a decade before shutting down the host computers. The failure rate of these newer drives really concerns me, though.

As for the RMA, I don't recall how fast I got back my 1.5TB replacement. I think it was within 2 weeks though. The other drives were in an OEM enclosure, the first of which I RMA'ed and got back quickly. The second failure I bagged it since it was out of warranty.

Good luck.

koitsu
MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
Humax BGW320-500

1 edit

koitsu to Ghastlyone

MVM

to Ghastlyone
Thanks -- that is exactly what I needed (mainly the "Health" tab, but the error scan in this specific situation has come in handy -- usually that isn't the case, but in your situation it is. Keep reading for details -- but for now you can abort the error scan, letting it finish won't serve a purpose past this point).

Your drive has what appears to be either severe magnetic substrate issues (meaning the magnetic surface on the platters is seriously out of whack in select areas), or one or more heads on your drive act peculiar when reading certain areas of the drive. Mechanical problems are also a possibility.

Per SMART attribute 0xC5, the drive has internally marked 34 LBAs as "suspect" -- meaning they cannot be read. This is a 512-byte sector drive, so you've lost bare minimum 17408 bytes of data across the entire drive. What files are impacted is difficult to ascertain. These LBAs can be re-analysed by issuing writes to them, and will determine if the associated sector is actually good or bad (good = marked usable again, bad = LBA gets remapped to a spare/alternate sector + SMART attribute 0xC6 increments. You lose data in both cases). This isn't worth doing though -- keep reading.

SMART attribute 0x01 can (is) directly affected by issues reading sectors on the drive. However, from your error scan, at roughly the 46% mark of the scan, we can see that there are 1165 LBAs which are unreadable. 1165 is significantly higher than 34.

I should point out, however, that the reason that SMART attribute 0x01 says "FAILED" is because at one point during the drive's lifetime (and that's a total of 15 hours! Talk about new! ) the "Current" field for SMART attribute 0x01 reached a value less than or equal to "Threshold". Currently the value is 78 ("Current"), which is higher than 51, but that doesn't mean much given the massive number of errors you're seeing presently.

This is how I reached the analysis/conclusion, re: magnetic substrate problems, head alignment/oddities, or mechanical issues. Which is the root cause is very hard for me to determine and is basically pointless (Western Digital will do this themselves).

RMAing the drive is absolutely the right (and only) choice given this circumstance. The drive is in bad shape internally and I wouldn't trust any data on it.

One final question: what is the manufacturing date on the drive (it's printed on the label)? If this is a drive manufactured very recently then that's pretty sad -- drives shouldn't come out of the factory in this shape. If the drive was manufactured a while back (say, 2-3 years ago), its possible that something physical or magnetic may have happened to it during its existence that caused this problem.

Just remember: every hard disk vendor has problems and nobody is perfect. Bad batches happen all the time too (that's why WD Support cares quite a lot about the serial number + manufacturing date + plant), across all vendors. For example, Seagate might be great this quarter but suck horribly the next. This applies universally to all MHDD vendors.

Ghastlyone
Premium Member
join:2009-01-07
Nashville, TN

Ghastlyone

Premium Member

Awesome, Koitsu. Thank you for that thorough response

I've definitely learned some new things today regarding HDD's.

When I get the replacement hard drive in the mail, I'm going to run HD Tune before installing any programs. That should save some time and frustration in case the next one is bad.

Also, the original packaging this WD came in was strange. The drive was inside an anti-static bag with 2 end caps holding each end inside a cardboard box. No bubble wrap or anything. That kind of surprised me, being how delicate that things can be. The whole thing has left a bad taste so far.

Anyways, sorry for the confusion earlier in the thread.

koitsu
MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
Humax BGW320-500

3 recommendations

koitsu

MVM

said by Ghastlyone:

When I get the replacement hard drive in the mail, I'm going to run HD Tune before installing any programs. That should save some time and frustration in case the next one is bad.

That is a very wise choice (and is what I do with drives I get which are new). I should explain to you the proper procedure for doing a thorough/correct test, however:

1. Plug in the drive + run HD Tune Pro
2. Pick the drive + go to the Health tab
3. Take a screenshot of the SMART statistics
4. Run an Error Scan -- it's okay to check the "Quick scan" checkbox for this run -- and let it run completely.
5. Back to the Health tab: take a screenshot of the SMART statistics
6. Go to the Erase tab and choose to erase the drive. DO NOT check "Verify". The fill mode should be "Zero fill" (I cannot stress this enough; do not pick any other mode!) -- this will write zeros across the entire drive
7. Back to the Health tab: take a screenshot of the SMART statistics

I can explain the reason behind this method if folks want to know.

If certain SMART statistics between steps 5 and 7 are different (I mainly focus on 0x05, 0xC4, 0xC5, 0xC6, and 0xC7 for WD drives), then you can post the before-and-after shots here and I can provide an analysis for you. There are other attributes to focus on as well, but not all of them. Some will vary with use and are acceptable.

It's important to understand that when reading SMART attributes that you don't just look at the "Data" column (also known as RAW_VALUE) and if it's non-zero assume something is wrong. So many people do that and it's just completely incorrect/invalid. I can explain why if need be, or refer you to past posts of mine where I explain it in further detail.
said by Ghastlyone:

Also, the original packaging this WD came in was strange. The drive was inside an anti-static bag with 2 end caps holding each end inside a cardboard box. No bubble wrap or anything. That kind of surprised me, being how delicate that things can be. The whole thing has left a bad taste so far.

That's 100% normal/standard packaging from Western Digital when buying a standalone (OEM) hard disk; there's nothing anomalous there. It should not leave a bad taste in your mouth; it's just your first time seeing how drives are shipped today. The Retail packages come with extra padding/yadda yadda, but it's not worth the price difference (unless the Retail package is cheaper, which does happen on occasion).
said by Ghastlyone:

Anyways, sorry for the confusion earlier in the thread.

No problem -- and thank you for clarifying + putting up with my "crotchety old man" attitude.

Krisnatharok
PC Builder, Gamer
Premium Member
join:2009-02-11
Earth Orbit

Krisnatharok

Premium Member

Another fantastic post boomarked!

Ghastlyone
Premium Member
join:2009-01-07
Nashville, TN

Ghastlyone to koitsu

Premium Member

to koitsu
Alright, I got the new HD in the mail today (thank you Western Digital for prompt service)

These are my scans from HD Tune Pro...
Ghastlyone

Ghastlyone

Premium Member

First one is the very first health scan. Second screen shot is the health after a "quick scan".
Ghastlyone

Ghastlyone

Premium Member

This is the after erasing the drive, and health tab afterwards....

Krisnatharok
PC Builder, Gamer
Premium Member
join:2009-02-11
Earth Orbit

Krisnatharok

Premium Member

I saw all that red and thought it was bad then saw it was the Erase tab. Does error scan pull anything up?

Ghastlyone
Premium Member
join:2009-01-07
Nashville, TN

Ghastlyone

Premium Member

said by Krisnatharok:

I saw all that red and thought it was bad then saw it was the Erase tab. Does error scan pull anything up?

Nothing at all, luckily.

koitsu
MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
Humax BGW320-500

koitsu to Ghastlyone

MVM

to Ghastlyone
Can you please resize the HD Tune Pro window so I can see all the SMART attributes under the Health tab, rather than just the ones at the top?

For some reason which I can't explain, the Erase method did not work -- this is confirmed not only from the 2500 error count, but notice the erase speed (4GBytes/second -- impossible). My guess is, for some reason, the OS has the drive locked and write requests are being denied. This would also explain why an Error Scan in HD Tune Pro worked fine (those are read requests).

Does this new drive already have a partition on it or something of that nature? Did you have Disk Management or a partition manager also running at the same time you did the erase? Anything like that?

Alternately you can try Active@ KillDisk (version 7, for Windows) and see if that works better for you. But if something has locked access to the disk device (partition/volume manager, WD utilities, etc.) then writes aren't going to work there either.

Ghastlyone
Premium Member
join:2009-01-07
Nashville, TN

Ghastlyone

Premium Member

I'll re run the scans tonight. As far as I know, there is no partition on the drive yet. So I'm not certain why the Erase didn't work.

koitsu
MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
Humax BGW320-500

3 edits

koitsu

MVM


HD Tune Pro acting stupid

HD Tune Pro acting even more stupid
Me either, unless HD Tune Pro was already running when you plugged in the drive (e.g. you "hot-swapped" it in), in which case re-launching HD Tune Pro should solve that. But somehow I don't think that's what happened.

I can assure you that the Erase feature in HD Tune Pro works since I've used it myself many times over, but Active@ KillDisk provides more granularity -- and if it fails, might actually shed some light on what the error reason is (volume locked, etc.). Windows does so much nonsense with disk drives under-the-hood (ranging from services to stuff the actual kernel does) that its infuriating at times.

Edit: I was able to reproduce the oddity with HD Tune Pro when trying to erase a 8GB CF drive I have. The first attempt actually erased successfully for about the first 1/40th of the drive, then spit out red the rest of the time (claiming something like 2428 errors). A subsequent Erase resulted in all errors (also 2500 error count, just like yours). Possibly the author of this software busted something in the 5.00 release, I'm not sure.

I gave Active@ KillDisk a shot. When erasing the same device, I decided to uncheck "Ignore all errors" just to see what transpired. The CF drive did erase, but intermittently I'd get "device is unable to erase sector xxx" where the sectors seemed somewhat arbitrary:

Error (the device is not ready) writing sector 104580 on Removable Disk 2.
Error (the device is not ready) writing sector 306306 on Removable Disk 2.
 

I re-ran the erase with "Ignore all errors" checked, and it did complete, but with this log message:

Bad (unwritable) sectors detected from 394758 to 15523839 on Removable Disk 2.
 

Complete bullshit. I'm not really sure what these programs are doing, because this is not rocket science to accomplish.

Finally, I resorted to using dd for Windows, which I know interacts with the underlying device using the proper methodology and is no-nonsense:

D:\Util\dd for Win32>dd --list
...
\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0
  link to \\?\Device\Harddisk2\DR18
  Removable media other than floppy. Block size = 512
  size is 7948206080 bytes
...
 
D:\Util\dd for Win32>dd if=/dev/zero of=\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0 bs=64k --progress
rawwrite dd for windows version 0.6beta3.
Written by John Newbigin <jn@it.swin.edu.au>
This program is covered by terms of the GPL Version 2.
 
733,760k
 

...and is still going, with no errors so far. So like I said, I don't know what these other programs are doing, but it's utter nonsense.

Edit #2: dd finished. Not a single REAL I/O error (keep reading and I'll explain what's shown):

7,761,920k Error writing file: 27 The drive cannot find the sector requested
7,761,920k
121281+0 records in
121280+0 records out
 

The "error" shown is actually normal given the flags I gave dd. The 8GB CF drive is 7948206080 bytes, and I requested a read/write size of 64k (65536 bytes). 7948206080 / 65536 = exactly 121280.

The above term "record" isn't magical -- it's simply a counter of how many reads (from the if device, in this case /dev/zero, which is just a pseudo-device that returns zeros) and writes (to the of device) issued.

I did not specify a count directive to say "only read/write this many records". dd tried to go past the end of the drive by 1 record (an extra 65536 bytes), and the underlying drive said "yeah right, bye", hence the records in vs. records out delta of 1. So the drive was fully erased successfully up until that last "bogus" write.

The question is why dd tried to go past the end of the device if it could have calculated its size. Well, this behaviour is documented on the dd for Windows web site:
quote:
On many usb devices this is not reliable so you should use --size to guess the size of the device, see below.

Traditionally when using dd, if you wanted to copy an entire device, you did not specify a block count and dd would read until it reached the end of the device. If you tried to read past the end of the device, the data up to the end of the device would be returned and if you kept reading you would get an error message. Windows however does not always do this so --size will tell dd to figure out the size of the device and make sure it does not read past that point. This is important for USB sticks which stop working if you read past the end of them. This is not on by default because getting the correct size of the device is not always possible. Some devices also keep returning bogus data past the end of the device without returning a suitable error code.

I didn't use the --size parameter, as you can see, so there's the explanation for the final error shown in dd. But the drive did get erased. I even verified using HxD which can "open a raw disk" and let you look at all its bytes/sectors.

So yep, HD Tune Pro's Erase feature, and Active@ KillDisk, are doing something stupid in their code or are just buggy. See what you get for relying on GUI tools? :-) Sigh.

Krisnatharok
PC Builder, Gamer
Premium Member
join:2009-02-11
Earth Orbit

Krisnatharok to koitsu

Premium Member

to koitsu
said by koitsu:

I should explain to you the proper procedure for doing a thorough/correct test, however:

1. Plug in the drive + run HD Tune Pro
2. Pick the drive + go to the Health tab
3. Take a screenshot of the SMART statistics
4. Run an Error Scan -- it's okay to check the "Quick scan" checkbox for this run -- and let it run completely.
5. Back to the Health tab: take a screenshot of the SMART statistics
6. Go to the Erase tab and choose to erase the drive. DO NOT check "Verify". The fill mode should be "Zero fill" (I cannot stress this enough; do not pick any other mode!) -- this will write zeros across the entire drive
7. Back to the Health tab: take a screenshot of the SMART statistics

I can explain the reason behind this method if folks want to know.

If certain SMART statistics between steps 5 and 7 are different (I mainly focus on 0x05, 0xC4, 0xC5, 0xC6, and 0xC7 for WD drives), then you can post the before-and-after shots here and I can provide an analysis for you. There are other attributes to focus on as well, but not all of them. Some will vary with use and are acceptable.

It's important to understand that when reading SMART attributes that you don't just look at the "Data" column (also known as RAW_VALUE) and if it's non-zero assume something is wrong. So many people do that and it's just completely incorrect/invalid. I can explain why if need be, or refer you to past posts of mine where I explain it in further detail.

Koitsu, you should really sticky this post as a "Just bought a new HDD, first steps" thread.

I'm finishing up zeroing a new WD1002FAEX-00Y9A0 (1TB) for my stepson--HD Tune Pro 5.00 is doing fine with zeroing the HDD, and it's returned no errors yet.
bbear2
Premium Member
join:2003-10-06
dot.earth

bbear2 to koitsu

Premium Member

to koitsu

If certain SMART statistics between steps 5 and 7 are different (I mainly focus on 0x05, 0xC4, 0xC5, 0xC6, and 0xC7 for WD drives), then you can post the before-and-after shots here and I can provide an analysis for you. There are other attributes to focus on as well, but not all of them. Some will vary with use and are acceptable.

Which ones do you focus on for Seagate drives?

neonhomer
Dearborn 5-2750
Premium Member
join:2004-01-27
Edgewater, FL

neonhomer to Krisnatharok

Premium Member

to Krisnatharok
said by Krisnatharok:

said by koitsu:

Koitsu, you should really sticky this post as a "Just bought a new HDD, first steps" thread.

Now I'm worried... I have about two weeks or so on my new system, but I installed my OS on a 750GB Seagate that was from my old system. I didn't format it, I just pulled my "My Documents" folder off, and then let Win7 install.

I also have a new (3 weeks old) Seagate 2TB that I am offloading a lot of data to. I'm wondering if I should run HD Tune Pro on it to make sure the drive is going to cooperate.

With that said, I have a couple of smaller, older drives that I might move the data off of and run HD Tune Pro on them for a checkup. (One is a 80GB WD that holds all of my MP3s..)

Krisnatharok
PC Builder, Gamer
Premium Member
join:2009-02-11
Earth Orbit

1 recommendation

Krisnatharok

Premium Member

Always have redundancy regardless of what a program says about a current drive. You never know what may happen tomorrow.

neonhomer
Dearborn 5-2750
Premium Member
join:2004-01-27
Edgewater, FL

neonhomer

Premium Member

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Thought I would add this... This is my OS drive I am running on right now...

I'd have to check, but I am sure this drive is out of warranty. (EDIT: Yup, out of warranty) So I guess I am going to go shopping for a new drive tomorrow after work, and just clone this one over to the new drive.

I am running SMART tests on my other drives now...