Hard drive(s) failing, what could be the cause?

[jnelsoninjax]

I have 4 physical HDD's, of which Crystal disk info shows cautions on 3 of them, 2 show: current pending sector count (100) and uncorrectable sector count (100), and one show reallocated sectors count (88) with a threshold of (36) of course one of these drives is my OS drive, and I am already having issues after reinstalling less then a week ago, and drive C shows a dirty bit so chkdsk will run each boot. Also these drives are less then 4 years old, and the OS drive is less then 1 year.

[Hum]

Too much poRn ? :shifty:

What brand drives, rpm's ?

These are all in one case ?

Maybe not well cooled, too much heat doing them in.

Maybe that Spinrite can help.

[Detection]

3 of my 4 HDDs show the same errors in the same program and have done for years but all work fine regardless

[Circaflex]

honestly i will only go by results that come from the MFGs diagnostics program. In my field i have seen too many false positives when running some of these third party programs, what brand are they? i know WesternDigital has WDDiag/WD Data Lifeguard, Seagate has Seatools, Hitatchi has DFT, etc.

[Eric Veteran]

Without more information I'm going to go with Hum's theory. You could have a cooling issue. Are the SMART temp values within the threshold the drive says are normal?

[Farstrider]

If they are Seagates then it does not surprise me!

[Circaflex]

If they are Seagates then it does not surprise me!

you can honestly say that about all the HDD MFG's. Ive had maxtors, seagates, wd, hitatchis all fail

[Detection]

My Seagate is the only one NOT showing errors :p

[Mindovermaster Moderator]

Yeah, I have a few Seagate drives still working from the 98 era.

[2xSilverKnight]

Make sure you have a stable power output coming from your power suply or wall socket. It can cause corrupted data and clusters on a hard drive.

[jnelsoninjax]

These are all 7200RPM drives:

[Circaflex]

run the seagate tools and wd tools on your drives to ensure its actually bad

http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?modelno=wd10eads&x=0&y=0

[jnelsoninjax]

I can not run seatools due to .net being corrupt, and I can not fix this because the OS drive is bad. I will run WD in the morning.

[jnelsoninjax]

Oddly enough this is not the OS drive, the OS drive happens to be a segate, and since I can not run seatools, I really can not get an accurate reading.

[Detection]

Just installed Crystal Disk Info again, in Windows 7, 3 of the 4 drives had errors

In Windows 8, only 1 of 4 disks have errors now

And those 3 disks that did have errors did so format after format with 7, and 2 of those disks are storage and do not get formatted ever, so .... wouldn't put too much trust in that program

[+BudMan MVC]

"since I can not run seatools"

Just boot from the CD, grab the for dos iso - burn to CD.. Boot IT, run tests

http://www.seagate.com/support/internal-hard-drives/consumer-electronics/ld25-series/seatools-dos-master/

Step 1

In order to use the newest SeaTools for DOS, download the bootable CD image version to your desktop.

[Cereal Bawks]

You need to look at the raw values for this. The current and threshold values are a different representation, similar to a percentage. According to that screenshot, you have 1 pending and 1 unrecoverable sector on one disk without any reallocated on that one disk. It might just be a fluke and not be failing. That other drive has 528 reallocations (0x210 hex), which is a sure as **** sign that it'll blow up soon enough. The third has 47 uncorrectables, you should keep your eyes on that.

Any unusual and/or rhythmic noises from your harddisks, you better pray that your backups are in order. I had a Seagate fail last week, I've only made the backup when the disk was already making the funny noises. And only two hours after being done with the several hours long file copying (backup disk on USB3), the thing finally gave its salute. And it had "only" 37 reallocations and 6 uncorrectables.

[Japlabot]

Hard drives fail. Let's be realistic here, there does not need to be a specific cause. Some drives fail within 1 year, some go for over 10 years strong. But face it that it is a mechanical part and sooner or later it is more prone to failure than any other component due to just wear and tear. Your drives are over 4 years old. Just pick up some new drives and move your data across so that it is safe from corruption (in addition to your regular backups) then you have all your old drives in which you can wipe all the data and re-test them without concern of damaging data on the drive even further. Whichever drives are OK and just needed a format are a bonus that you can keep using and the others you can return under 5 warranty if it has one or throw it out (environmentally friendly eWaste recycling of course).

[jnelsoninjax]

OK, according to Linux, the only drive that that is showing critical is also the newest drive (287 days uptime), my 250, single platter drive. According to the SMART data the relocated sector count is at 88 :/ it advises me to backup the data and replace the drive, now the 500GB that the OS is on only shows 2 in the relocated sector count, My real question is, should I trust the Linux SMART report over any other program, and if the 500 that the OS is installed to is not bad, why is my install of windows corrupt within 1 day of reinstalling?

[nekkidtruth]

OK, according to Linux, the only drive that that is showing critical is also the newest drive (287 days uptime), my 250, single platter drive. According to the SMART data the relocated sector count is at 88 :/ it advises me to backup the data and replace the drive, now the 500GB that the OS is on only shows 2 in the relocated sector count, My real question is, should I trust the Linux SMART report over any other program, and if the 500 that the OS is installed to is not bad, why is my install of windows corrupt within 1 day of reinstalling?

Just to play devil's advocate here for a moment....let's assume for the time being that your drive (the one the OS is on) is perfectly fine. What have you installed (software wise) that would cause your Windows to be corrupt, might be a better suited question.

[Billaguana]

What causes them to go bad? You're using them.

[briango]

If possible, check the drives on another system. A bad power supply can cause problems, and even kill a hard drive. The sata controller on the motherboard could be bad.

[jnelsoninjax]

Just to play devil's advocate here for a moment....let's assume for the time being that your drive (the one the OS is on) is perfectly fine. What have you installed (software wise) that would cause your Windows to be corrupt, might be a better suited question.

OK, lets play: When I noticed the corrupt files, and when SFC could not repair them, the only things I had installed were the core OS files, MS Office, Nvida drivers, Kaspersky Pure, and every program that I installed, I have installed prior and windows did not die. What sort of programs were you thinking that could cause these kind of problems, also note that chkdsk indicates a whole lot of cross linked files, has flagged the drive to be checked at reboot, but can not run due to as it states "some software program that was installed"

[nekkidtruth]

OK, lets play: When I noticed the corrupt files, and when SFC could not repair them, the only things I had installed were the core OS files, MS Office, Nvida drivers, Kaspersky Pure, and every program that I installed, I have installed prior and windows did not die. What sort of programs were you thinking that could cause these kind of problems, also note that chkdsk indicates a whole lot of cross linked files, has flagged the drive to be checked at reboot, but can not run due to as it states "some software program that was installed"

Software installations can cause all sorts of wacky problems. Just a side note, "I've installed it before" when it comes to anything (software or hardware) means absolutely nothing in the world of computers.

Before I go any further, I should probably note that I'm not attacking you or whatever knowledge you have, just simply playing devil's advocate as sometimes we just ignore things that are right in front of our face. Always good to be reminded of the random things that can and do happen during software installations.

That being said, there are all sorts of things that even just the software you mentioned can cause if one of the following were true (but definitely not limited to):

- Corrupt installation files.

- Infected installation files.

- Pirated software.

- Cracks

- NoCD hacks.

- Anti-Hacking tools installed by many online games.

The list goes on. I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with your hard drive(s), just that the software you're using to check could be showing you incorrect information and some of your issues may be related to software that's been installed. :)

If you're convinced it's your hard drive there are only 2 solutions to your problem really. Check them in a different system and or replace them. The quickest and easiest way (assuming it's an available option) is to check them in a different machine.

[jnelsoninjax]

I do not have any other desktop to check my HDD against, but I decided to run DD on the 250 and see what happens, the worst that will happen is that I end up RMAing again!