Should I be worried about my new drive?

[berlin88]

Should I be worried about my new drive?

I just purchased a new 1TB Caviar Black from Best Buy yesterday, to replace one of my other 1TB drives that was getting warning messages from HDTune and starting to fail.

I initially loaded the new drive on one of my dads computers (Windows XP 64 bit), to test it out and make sure it was fully operational. The WD Lifeguard and HDTune gave it a pass, and said it ws ok. SeaTools also gave it a pass.

This morning, I put new hard drive in my computer and loaded Windows 7 on the new 1TB Caviar Black drive. I then loaded HDTune and the WD Lifeguard program and did all the usual tests. I also loaded the trial version of HDDLife, and had that evaluate the drive as well.

When I ran HD Tune, there were changes in some of the numbers, although my drive still passed the tests and HDTune and the WD Life Guard both said it was an ok drive.

However, when I ran HDDLife, it said my brand new drive was at 84% for life and peformance rating. Is that bad? Shouldn't a brand new drive be closer to 100%?

Given that I have had other drives go bad over the last two years, could my motherboard (Asus M4A87TD) be causing them to go bad? Or do I just have bad luck with drives?


Pic #1 - My old Samsung Spinpoint drive that was getting a calibration retry count warning from HDTune, causing me to go out and get a new 1TB Caviar Black. I consulted with other people online, and the consesus was to replace the drive.

Pic #2- The New 1TB WD Caviar Black being tested on an old Windows XP machine, before installing it in my current system. Used HD Tune for drive testing, along with SeaTools, HDD Life and WD Lifeguard.

Pic #3 - My new WD 1TB Caviar Black of installing it in my computer, loading Windows 7 on it, and running HD Tune.

Pic #4 - Used HDD Life to examine the new drive after loading Windows 7 on it, and was informed that my drive is only at 84% health and performance, even though its brand new.

I also have an existing 1TB WD Caviar black, that also gets 84% on both the performance and fitness numbers from HDDlife. I should also add, that I have had my exiting motherboard for 2 years now, and I have now purchased a total of 4 new drives in that time period, with three of those new drives replacing drives that had gone bad or were starting to go bad.

Any chance my motherboard is the cause of multiple drives going bad?


My current systems is as follows:

Antec 1200 v2
Corsair TX 650
Asus M4A87TD
AMD Phenom II x4 965 Black Edition
8GB Kingston Hyper X DDR3 1600 (4GB x2)
EVGA GTX 660 OC (just got this at Best Buy to replace my old EVGA 9800GTX+)
Asus budget sound card
LG Blue Ray drive
1TB WD Caviar Black
1TB WD Caviar Black
1TB Samsung Spinpoint drive
1TB Seagate Baraccuda (It's from 2009 or 2010 I think)
Windows 7 64 bit
Samsung monitor
Logitech Z-640 speakers

 

[Mod-R]

I understand why you're upset about this situation, but were these three drives that failed brand new when installed? If they were used then it may just be wear/improper handling and bad luck. If they were brand new then we must be facing some kind of problem not related to the drives. Then some questions arise: how are the replacement drives you purchased doing? And how many time did it take for the first drives to fail? Did it happen about the same time for all three? Based on the timeline for the original drives to fail, and how many time you had the replacement drives, did you notice in testing or using that some of them replacement drives are already going downhill?

Your test results for the latest WD 1TB are fine. Yes, that 84% may seem wrong, but the OK comment, which doesn't seem so good neither, matches the "ok" output of the values displayed under "Health". Even where you get perfect results it still says just "ok". So "OK" seems to be the only option beside "ERROR". On the other hand, 84% performance and "Excellent" comment is quite good news. The correlation of the performance/health values seems adequate. Methinks no drive would ever get 100% in both these aspects with that particular program, that's all.

As for the motherboard, if it's really what worries you, I highly doubt it. You could always make sure that your SATA controller drivers are up to date - as much as they can be at least. But I guess you did that, just as you probably checked all the chipset drivers just to make sure.

You could also test the oldest replacement drive in your system with the same routine just to see the output.

 

[berlin88]

Thanks for the response.

My Samsung 1TB drive is maybe a year old or so, the first WD 1TB drive is about 7+ months old, the newest 1TB WD is about 2 days old, and the Seagate is from like 2009 or 2010.

I assume the warning message I was getting on the Samsung drive was a bad thing?

When I used HDDLife to tets the brand new drive, I thought 85% was a little low for a brand new drive, since my 7 month old WD 1TB is at 84%.

The HDTune numbers seem ok when I tested the new drive on Windows 7, but there was a change in the numbers after moving it to the Windows 7 comp and back to Windows XP.

For instance, the Spinup time was originally 185/185, 3733, when I tested the drive on my dads Windows XP comp. When I put it in the Windows 7 comp, the numbers changed to 173/173, 4325. When I put the drive back in the Windows XP comp, the numbers were 173/173, 4316.

Last night, I put my new drive back in the old XP comp, and ran all the performance tests again, and I got different numbers than I did on Friday.



When I tested the 1TB Caviar Black on Friday night (using an XP machine), I got these numbers:

When I tested the drive on my Windows 7 comp, I got these numbers:

When I retested the drive on the old XP Machine, I got these numbers:

Given that the drive is only a couple days old, what explains the change in performance numbers?

 

[Mod-R]

The program you use, and what processes are going on at the time you perform the tests.

Just take the oldest drive and test it a couple of times to see if you get the same kind of variations. It is normal for the 7 months old drive to get the same results than the new one. It just means it's running as a new. 7 months ain't so much use, neither.

I understand why you're so anxious about it all, but just relax and leave it be. Keep an eye on things and keep a good backup routine, but otherwise than that forget about it all and breathe easy.

 

[HankB]

I'm surprised that no one has said anything about the non-zero reallocated sector count. Of all of the drives I've checked (about a dozen) I have only two drives that have any count above zero. One is a 200GB Seagate Barracuda that has 6.25 years of power up time. It logged 13 errors at 188 days of uptime and has showed a reallocated sector count of 9 ever since. I suspect that a brownout resulted in both issues and the drive continues to soldier on.

I have a 2TB drive in a NAS box that is up to 227 reallocated sectors and growing. It's about a year old. If drives had not spiked in price, I would already have a replacement in hand as I expect it to eventually fail.

That you have two drives with non-zero reallocated sector counts could either be an interesting coincidence or an indication that something is causing problems in your system. If I had to guess about system problems, the PSU would be high on my list.

 

[GeneO]

What column are you looking at? All of the reallocated sector counts are zero.

To OP: your drives are fine. My two older 1TB Black have much longer spinup times than that and have been running fine for years.

 

[HankB]

What column are you looking at? All of the reallocated sector counts are zero.

"Current" in HD Tune and "Value" in the WD utility.

Am I misinterpreting the display? Ah... I see. the "Data" column is the one that counts.

:embarrassed: