Hard Drive Problems

'lo folks. Couple of Q's for you good people..

What can an Ultra DMA CRC Error count mean if you have absolutely isolated the drive as the problem as opposed to the cable? Is it likely to be sufficient for an RMA?

Oh and is a Calibration Retry count serious? Was hunting for the problem with two other drives and one of the few drives I had confidence in appears to have a problem too...?

TIA.

If you are experiencing the problem on more than one drive and you have eliminated the cable as the cause of the problem, then it has to be the disk controller. It may possibly be due to an overheating southbridge chip since that contains the disk controller circuitry.

Thanks,

Hmmm, tried different channels but what you say is possible. I would say likely apart from the fact that the problem drives are Samsung F1 Spinpoints (1TB), with which I've had endless problems and multo multo RMAs, and other disks connected to the same disk controller don't exhibit the same problem. Also I moved the disks to my dt PC to copy the data off after I noticed strange behaviour when they were in a different PC (they would disappear occasionally, the pc left running would be found at the 'please insert valid boot disk' post message...)

Guess I'll have to chuck them back in the other PC and run some tests on there to be sure.....

I get exactly the same results in a different PC, so it seems more likely that both identical drives are at fault rather than both different disk controllers. Having said that it could be that HD-Tune is at fault, but I do know there is something awry with the disks....

Does the HDD manafacter's website have a diagnostic tool - it is worth running that (if you aren't already) and seeing what it says - IIRC last time I had an issue it told me to return drive

Yeah, I ran it and it came up clear. However I only ran it because I knew there was a problem with the drive so the clear wasn't quite as reassuring as it might have been...

The last time I had trouble was with this model of drive, and the drive died completly before I could remove all my data. The time before that I had hard drive trouble was the same. Hence I really want to minimise the amount of time these drives spend up until I've settled this one way or the other. Last time I RMA'd one I asked the retailer if they would swap the model for me and give me something comparable, not possible under a warranty apparently. There's a 50% chance that the replacement drive is one of the 2 giving me grief today.