folders keep getting corrupted

[Odom Member]

I have a 3TB Hitachi HDD and I am noticing lately that folders on it frequently get corrupted and unaccessible. I can run a chkdsk or the Win 7 64bit built-in Error-Checking tool and it will fix it (pretty much the same), or the PC will boot and tell me during boot time that it needs to check the drive.

The problem is this is now occurring frequently, like every second day. I checked the HDD and it has no bad sectors nor do the Hitachi tools & diagnostics show any issues. The folders getting corrupted are also not always the same.

I'm considering buying another 3TB HDD tomorrow (Seagate ST3000DM001) and replace the current one, just to play it safe.

Does anyone know if this could be an HDD issue or something else causing it?

Thanks

Odom

[Farstrider]

How is the drive connected to the PC? USB or secondary internal drive? It could very well be a power issue and that for some reason the drive is losing power. In some cases, like hardware failure and power failure, the write back cache memory does not get flushed out to the actual drive. It may cause corruption of your data.

With "Write-Behind Caching" Enabled, these errors can occur with those hard drives that have write-behind caching enabled. Generally, write-behind caching should be enabled for internal hard drives and disabled for external drives. You can enable or disable write-behind caching via the Windows Device Manager.

[Odom Member]

Hi Farstrider,

I have it conencted internally, SATA3 port. You can see my hardware details in my sig, though I just noticed this drive isn't listed there :)

Also, it might be worth mentioning as I don't know if this makes a difference, but that drive has many writes of small files. I get hundred of small zipped files writton onto it, then unzip then, later have to zip again hundred of files and then remove them. I could try doing this on another drive for a day or two, see if this makes a difference.