Hard Drive is on its last legs, which one though?

youcancallmeal

I have four hard drives, 1 x 74GB, 1 x 250GB and 2 x 500GB.
I have Diskeeper running on a schedule every night starting at 4am to defragment all the hard drives but for the last two nights my PC has rebooted while defragmentation is running. In the event viewer there are errors coming up like this:

The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort2, did not respond within the timeout period.

The device, \Device\Harddisk3\D, has a bad block.(There are loads of these errors in particular)

Has anyone had these errors before? I presume one of my hard drives is about to die problem is I cant figure out which one?

Khannie

What's the smart data saying?

youcancallmeal

Everything passes :rolleyes: I don't think I've ever seen a hard drive that hasnt passed smart testing. Its a pretty pointless utility. I'm running western digital's extensive diagnostics on the hard drives now to see if it comes back with anything

BaconZombie

Sounds file a DeadLock Error so there is prob no real problem.
On a side note running a Defrag EVERY night will seriously shorten the life of your drive.

youcancallme>al wrote: »

I have four hard drives, 1 x 74GB, 1 x 250GB and 2 x 500GB.
I have Diskeeper running on a schedule every night starting at 4am to defragment all the hard drives but for the last two nights my PC has rebooted while defragmentation is running. In the event viewer there are errors coming up like this:

The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort2, did not respond within the timeout period.

The device, \Device\Harddisk3\D, has a bad block.(There are loads of these errors in particular)

Has anyone had these errors before? I presume one of my hard drives is about to die problem is I cant figure out which one?

youcancallmeal

BOFH_139 wrote: »

Sounds file a DeadLock Error so there is prob no real problem.
On a side note running a Defrag EVERY night will seriously shorten the life of your drive.

Yeah reckon I'll probably change it to once a week and see what happens.

youcancallmeal

Just finished running the Western Digital diagnostics and it appears its my 74GB Raptor that has the problem. That would make sense too because why would the PC crash and restart if it was just one of the other storage drives.
I have the raptor partioned into two logical drives with half for Vista and the other for XP, maybe if I just format and install only one OS using the full it'll be ok

yoyo

youcancallme>al wrote: »

Just finished running the Western Digital diagnostics and it appears its my 74GB Raptor that has the problem. That would make sense too because why would the PC crash and restart if it was just one of the other storage drives.
I have the raptor partioned into two logical drives with half for Vista and the other for XP, maybe if I just format and install only one OS using the full it'll be ok

Did it fail the diagnostics? Did it click much at all, If I were you I'd back up immediately just in case, and if the drive has issiues, formatting possibly wont help it, you could try low level formatting it with the western digital utility and then re running diagnostics, I'd be quick at backing up if I were you though

Nick

youcancallmeal

yoyo wrote: »

Did it fail the diagnostics? Did it click much at all, If I were you I'd back up immediately just in case, and if the drive has issiues, formatting possibly wont help it, you could try low level formatting it with the western digital utility and then re running diagnostics, I'd be quick at backing up if I were you though

Nick

It did fail the diagnostics. I'm not too worried because its the drive that holds my OS/programs so I can just format and re-install everything. I use all the others drives for storage. Its a strange problem though because besides the crashing when defragmentation takes place Windows is stable. Also I don't know if its clicking because its in a sound dampening enclosure in my PC. I'll probably just write all zero's to it and then re-install xp and see how that goes.

L31mr0d

BOFH_139 wrote: »

On a side note running a Defrag EVERY night will seriously shorten the life of your drive.

proof!

Seriously this is another one of those urban myths that gets spread around but there exists very little (if any) hard evidence to back it up.

The same people that spread around these myths are the ones that believe AS5 is conductive and that a RAID 0 set up is very dangerous.

Defraging lengthens the life of your drive by reducing the seek time to find files. A HDD goes through a lot more stress searching for the parts of a fragmented file. The more frequent you defragment the less files will need to be moved each time it runs.

Sure Vista is set by default to defragment your drive every night.

zilog_jones

BOFH_139 wrote: »

Sounds file a DeadLock Error so there is prob no real problem.

Dunno about that, "bad blocks" usually means there's unrecoverable bad blocks on the disk. From my experience you may get a few bad blocks and the rest of the disk will be fine for years (not on 24/7 or any high load though), or there's a catastrophic failure within a short time period (usually leaving on overnight and finidng it dead in the morning). I'm not saying it's not likely something else could happen though.

Does a full CHKDSK test reveal any bad sectors? Try the /r switch as well.

Its a strange problem though because besides the crashing when defragmentation takes place Windows is stable.

The bad block(s) could be in a fragmented file that is infrequently used and is not critical to the operation of Windows. My friend had bad blocks in his porifle's ntuser.dat file - now that cocked things up!

L31mr0d

OP, what percentage of space is free on each of your HDD's

youcancallmeal

74GB is 24% free
250GB is 31% free
1st 500GB is 36% free
2nd 500GB is 27% free

They are all less than 4 years old. Come to think of it I've never had a hard drive failure so I'm probably due one

jimmycrackcorm

L31mr0d wrote: »

proof!

The same people that spread around these myths are the ones that believe AS5 is conductive and that a RAID 0 set up is very dangerous.

Defraging lengthens the life of your drive by reducing the seek time to find files. A HDD goes through a lot more stress searching for the parts of a fragmented file. The more frequent you defragment the less files will need to be moved each time it runs.

So true! I have a preference for Raid 0 for performance and use an external USB drive for backups.