A year and a half ago I bought 500GB Seagate 7200.11 ST3500320AS. At that time it still had the old firmware and about a half year ago it get BSY problem (till then everything was OK with it), but I've managed to solve it through the Hyperterminal. Then I upgraded its firmware to SD1A and everything seemed to be OK (though the fact is I wasn't using HDD very often at that time).
In February this year I've upgraded my OS from Vista x64 to Windows 7 x64, everything still looked OK; Seagate HDD (along with about 5 years old HDD from Western Digital with OS on it) was running well.
Then at the beginning of April, the bad sectors problem started. Suddenly Seagate HDD started to make a weird noises (as if its motor was turning off) when I was copying files on it or from it, and sometimes even when I was deleting files. It used to happen that the whole computer froze and I had to use the restart-button.
I figured out it was a bad sector problem, ran Seatools for Dos and corrected the wrong sectors successfully. But it didn't help - new bad sectors appeared after a few days. Seatools always managed to repair them, but they just kept appearing, always in the company of that weird noise from HDD.
At the end of April I gave up and returned the HDD to the seller. In half of May he gave me a new one - or to be more precise, the same model (ST3500320AS) and size, just the different serial number (the new HDD was labeled "Certified Repaired HDD"). Its firmware was SD1A.
But after a week, the very same problems appeared again; again bad sectors, again weird noises, again freezing OS. The system sometimes even didn't boot or it didn't detect one of the HDD partitions (I guess bad sectors appeared even in the system volume info when the system was shooting down). So I returned it again.
Four days ago, they gave me the third HDD - again same model, same size, same firmware. Right now, my HDD monitor shows in the column Work Time 3 Days 5 hours. And the problems are back. Again the very same appearing of the bad sectors and freezing.
Now I don't know whether it's the issue of the new SD1A firmware or Windows 7 or what... I even thought the problem could be in my computer - I ran memtest to see if there's a problem in RAM, but none was found. And then, I have the second (Western Digital) HDD and it runs flawlessly. The problem is just with Seagate 7200.11 ST3500320AS.
Did someone encountered the same or a similar problem?
