Manufacturers are always pushing the capabilities of hard disk technology, so much so that bad disks will always crop up now and again. The days when disk drives could be certified as "error free" are long gone. I use WD drives and have never had any problems with them. It's just the luck of the draw.

Yeah obviously some are casualties of fast mass production

Could be some task doing intensive IO and keeping the disk busy for a while. Likely culprits would be indexing (possibly if the system is very new it hasn't fully indexed the disk yet) or antivirus. Try running resource monitor and check what processes are using the disk next time it happens.

Yes, but you expect that level of error to show up in tests or in SMART.

Will do thanks

In reply to a post by lt567:

Yeah obviously some are casualties of fast mass production

It has nothing to do with mass production but rather the way in which data is recorded to the disk.

Modern drives cram so much data onto the platters that it cannot be read reliably without using sophisticated error-correction codes. If error-correction fails for any sector, an alternate sector is allocated, usually on a part of the disk reserved for this purpose. If that sector gives uncorrectable errors, another alternate sector is allocated and so on.

Managing alternate sectors can really slow down hard drive performance, to the point where they become unusable. Solid-state drives are not immune to this and, indeed, may be more prone to alternate sector allocation problems.

Yes, but you expect that level of error to show up in tests or in SMART.

You would think that, but it isn't always the case. I recently had a very similar issue with a PC (frequent inexplicable stalls). I replaced the HDD and all the problems went away. This is despite using several SMART utilities, which all told me the disk was fine (I suspected the disk was the issue). Curiously, when I attached the disk to a Mac it registered as failing SMART tests as soon as it mounted.

Presumably when you replaced the disk you cloned at either file-system or sector level what was on the old disk onto the new one? In which case, you cannot ascertain the issues to the hard disk.

Try booting from a WinPE disk and deleting C:\Windows\system32\SRU\SRUDB.dat. Windows will recreate it.

Just curious If you were to send a HDD back to the retailer and they ran tests such as SMART tests and it all passed, how are you supposed to get a replacement if that is the case and you are adamant it is indeed the disk?

In relation to this I ran the full extended Western Digital test for a few hours and it passed fully.