Possible hard drive failure signs?

Shadowsilence

I'm running 2x120 gig hard drives in my rig. Lately I've heard them making louder than normal noises while reading. I'm not sure if it's just because I switched cases, and the drives are closer to my ears.

But also yesterday when I booted up my computer after having no problems the night before. It went through the sata raid window, showing my drives, and only one drive showed up. I rebooted, and again only one drive showed up and windows wouldn't boot. I've had this problem before with windows not booting, but the sata raid window always showed two drives. What would you suggest to test my drive in case it might fail soon. If I test the drive and all works out, I'll try replacing the sata data cables.

BeerCheeze · Posted: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 08:51:15 Post Subject:

Are you running RAID 0 or RAID 1?

PRpaTi · Rated R Joined: 16 Mar 2005 Posts: 89 Location: SI, NY

Just in case, download smartUDM and put it in a bootable floppy... it will give you all the parameters from S.M.A.R.T. and give you an idea of the overall "health" of your drive.

You can also read this guide for a better idea of what the parameters mean.

I'd take the parameters with a grain of salt, because I just noticed that both my Seagate drives (ATA100 80 GB (+/- 5 y/o) and SATA 160 GB (<1 week old)) have almost the same parameters (with the exception of the cycle count) and crappy fitness, while the WD SATA 120 GB (+/- 3 months old) shows perfect fitness, so probably the manufaturer plays with the system's values around to impress the end user... just a thought

Shadowsilence · Posted: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 13:18:10 Post Subject:

I ran RAID 0 awhile back but stopped. They're just seperate now.

BeerCheeze · Posted: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 13:30:26 Post Subject:

OK, so they are just separate drives then?

If so, one thing you can do is go to the HDD manufactures web site, they all have utilities that can run and check the status of their drives.

You can also stress test it, but I wouldn't recommend that unless you have the data backed up.

T-shirt · Posted: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 13:35:55 Post Subject:

since one runs and one doesn't, try switching the cable between them, that should at least clarify if it's a cable problem(cheap fix) or worse.
SATA cables seem to get loose/lose connection more easily than IDE so reseating them would be the easist first step.
All drives get louder with age, and this eventually means failure, but has the type of sound changed?

Shadowsilence · Posted: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 17:59:18 Post Subject:

I ran the Seagate utility on both hard drives. Each hard drive is in two paritions, the two mostly used failed the utility tests, while the two parititons that are rarely used passed. The Operating system partition failed, and the one where I store the majority of my data failed. Swap space, and another partition for data are fine. All the drives passed the physical portions of the test, but the failed when it came to file structure. The utility suggested running scandisk. Which I did, but I'll probably end up reformatting the hard drives since I haven't done that for quite some time.

BeerCheeze · Posted: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 21:02:43 Post Subject:

What OS are you running? And what file system?

Shadowsilence · Posted: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 21:19:40 Post Subject:

Windows XP Professional with NTFS.

MTechnik · Posted: Sat, 30 Apr 2005 17:39:54 Post Subject:

I'd do a re-format, then go back to using them as a mirrored pair. The signs are pointing to possible issues in a bit. Then again, some drives can be in that 1/2 state forever. I had an 18GB scsi drive that suddenly popped some bad blocks. Then about 6 months later, a few more. I'd just need to do a full format, it would find and mark them and the drive was awesome for like 6 years.

So, mirror 'em, so you get that advantage at least, then just keep motoring happily. Or unload them on ebay.

-MT