Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[colmc]

I have a Maxtor 7L250R0 disk which is a few years old and out of warranty. I have been rebuilding my system and decided to test all my hard drives.

I started by running the Vista Tools and then ran Seatools for Windows. The disk failed the short test, so I took the software advice and ran the long test which it passed. I then ran Seatrools for DOS and again the disk fails the short test but passes the long one.

I get a code of POH 44881, but I understand that this is used in the warranty system to check if a replacement  is required. So I have no more info on what the problem is.

So which result do I trust? The pass or the fail.

Any thoughts welcome.

Thanks

Colin

[zasy99]

Since the software tools you tried aren't giving you anything usefull if I were you I would try and read out the SMART info and go from there.

Grab a program such asCrystalDiskInfo:

http://download.cnet.com/CrystalDiskInfo/3000-2086_4-10832082.html

Inform yourself about how to read SMART attributes so you can interpret and judge the drive for yourself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

Best of luck.

[colmc]

Zazzy99

Thanks fopr those pointers.

I've dl'd CrystalDisk Info and its giving me a caution, on Reallocated Sectors count at 303 and Current Pending Sector Count at 10.

Having read a bit more, I've also downloaded HD Tune, and I'm waiting for it to finish.

This is much more and better info. I'll almost certainly dump this disk once the tests have run.

Thanks for your help

Colin

[zasy99 · Accepted solution]

Colmc, my pleasure, glad to help.

Now we know that the drive is throwing out Reallocated Sector Count and Current Pending Sector Count SMART warnings I would also be inclined to say the drive is on the way out.

I would not trust it anymore but you have already come to that conclusion.

The good thing is that SMART is being used on all drives these days so its not vendor specific, now you have a way to monitor your drive health for any disk you get.

Keep in mind though that even a seemingly healthy drive can also 'die' at any moment from electromechanical failure, never trust your data on any disk, even 'healthy' ones, always have a backup.

[colmc]

Thanks for the feedback.

I plan to keep both progs on all my PC's now. Just spotted a single bad sector using the HDTune prog on my laptop. Need to see if I can mark that one as bad. Do you have any other hidden gems in software progs to make sure that these sectors are marked as out of bounds?

Ta

Colin

[zasy99]

colmc:

No, no extra programs.

A single bad sector is not a major issue, it just shouldn't grow to more over a short period of time.

Each drive size / manufacturer has their own acceptable number of bad sectors before SMART will raise a warning, that's the threshold level they set and what you see in SMART.

In regards to marking it as bad.  New-age drives will do that via their own firmware.  When an attempt to write to a sector fails the drive will write that data to a reserved area and mark the sector as bad, this is called remapping.  This all happens automatically without the need for intervention from your side.