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

[FieldMedic]

I have 2 PCs which have been built with very similar hardware both running XP.

After working fine for a couple of months files started to randomly corrupt until one PC failed. The other PC followed a few weeks later with random files corrupting until the PC becomes unusable.

After reinstalling XP the same thing happens, and seems to be happening in a shorter and shorter time frame, from lasting a day, to now a matter of hours on the 4th reinstall.

The hard drive being used is a:
Seagate ST3250410AS 250GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 16MB Cache (7200.10 series)

I have ran SeaTools both Short Test and Long Test but it said the drive passed.

I also Zero Filled the entire hard drive before doing a fresh reinstall but the problem still persisted with files quickly corrupting until XP wouldn't load.

It was not just XP files that corrupted but any random file on the hard drive was corrupting (but not on other slave hard drives).

I suspect the hard drives in both machines are bad but with SeaTools saying they are fine I'm confused.

Any advice? Should I go with a new hard drive?

[jhpope]

I have had the same problem with my 500GB version. I have rma'd it at least 3 times. It was replaced with a 750GB version, but the same thing happens. I have no idea what the problem is. I think my solution is to buy a western digital.

Especially with the .11 problems. Which I have a 1TB drive that I have rma'd once.

I was thinking of rma'ing my motherboard, but I don't think this is the problem. If anyone has this problem and has found a solution I'd love to hear it. Been probably two years I haven't had a stable pc because of this.

[wiak]

run HD Tune Error Scan and see if you get damaged blocks

http://hdtune.com/ 

[FieldMedic]

If you have an nVidia chipset in your motherboard the drivers could be the problem.

I got mine sorted. Full post here:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-256681_10_0.html

Message Edited by FieldMedic on 01-21-2009 08:02 AM

[jhpope]

I had problems both before and after installing the nVidia drivers. I ordered a western digital. I guess if I still have problems I will try and replace the motherboard with something that has an AMD chipset

[pmeslin]

I've had that problem recently on a totally different hard drive (WD). I suggest you try downloading memtest or memtest86+ and let it run for 12-24 hours on the system. It turned out that the memory and chipset were marginally unstable at their rated clock speed (DDR3-2000MHz) and would only run properly and without data corruption at a lower frequency (1333MHz at first then 1600MHz stably after a bios update). I realize it does not exactly apply as you have an AMD system and not an Intel system but it would be an important thing to test. The RAM would effectively 'flip' some few random bits on certain specific write patterns, effectively corrupting the data. Accessing a hard drive in DMA mode makes use of the memory so it can explain data corruption.

After fixing the memory issue everything ran perfectly.

['nar]

I have seen this problem among multiple drives and system over the past couple of years now.  I have been suspecting some type of drive electronics issue, but it wasn't until recently that it happened on one of my drives that I could isolate it.

I have a P4 2.4 GHz system with an Intel chipset that had an IDE 40 GB Maxtor drive.  It was an older drive, and slow, so I cloned it to a 40 GB Seagate SATA drive.  After three months, XP would no longer boot.  I'd get some registry errors right before hand, and sometimes a chkdsk would work once or twice, but usually it required a complete reload or re-image from the original IDE drive.  Luckily, I still had that.

Spinrite, chkdsk, and SeaTools all found no issue with the drive.

With the new image, it lasted one month or two.  I tried a new SATA cable, and used the second SATA port on my RAID card, no help, didn't last.  I RMA'd the drive.  While I waited for that, I cloned the data to a WD 74 GB Raptor and used the original SATA cable and primary SATA port.  It ran for two months without a hitch, so I reinstalled the refurb drive I had received from RMA.  It lasted a few weeks, same problem.  

So, I have been working on and off with this PC for nearly 10 months now.  The IDE has never failed, the Raptor has never failed, the Seagate drives have both failed, several times, even though the tests for them all pass.  All I can figure is it has to be a data transfer issue, corrupting data before it is written to the drive.  It could be bad cache memory, or just a bad controller on the drive, but it is most certainly the drive itself somehow but not the disk or read/write heads.

I agree with a previous poster.  Even though I had been recommending Seagate drives due to the 5 year warranty, I now recommend WD.  The data is worth more than the drive, so the warranty is worthless.  You may get a new drive(refurb), but your data is still gone.  Well not completely mind you, you can slave the drive to another system and pull data off, but the OS on it is toast.  And with no error code from the Seatools, how do you know the problem is fixed on the refurb drive?  There is a serious QA problem here, and it affects the reliability of your data.  I just cannot tolerate that.