ANOTHER failing hard drive?!!!!

Kage

Golden Master
Messages
13,873
ARGGHHH!!!!

If you've been watching my threads over the past years, you'd have noticed I've had my fairshare of failing hard drives.

Well... it seems, my latest batch is no change to that.

Bought myself 2 WD 1TB HD's set to RAID 1 for my Windows 7 build.
Just noticed now, one of them has started to click, and rather a lot too, whilst re-building the RAID array, which shouldn't be happening at all, because nothing crashed... All I did was turned off the computer overnight, and unplugged the Windows XP drive I had installed to copy files over, and then disconnected that one drive back to the 1 array. I've done that before, no problem.

Why in hell do I keep getting them?

*click click clikc...clclclclcl....click *few seconds later* click click*
 
i have no clue but Windows XP On My computer wouldnt boot up one day but i had the restore disc's for my gateway tower and i popped that in and it worked so i am now running vista. but maybe HDD's Dont Like You!
 
I don't think they do. That's why I always go with RAID 1 arrays now.

Litterally, this is the 5th-6th HDD thats gone since I built this PC approx 6 years ago? Thats 1 a year.
 
Yeah, I'm using Western Digital Caviar Blacks, which are meant to be pretty good. Something certainly isn't right.

I'll try and get a recording of the clicking. They come fast and often, depending on what I'm doing.
While it's rebuilding, its happening alot.
I'm also having programs randomly going down at the moment.
All this has started today... It was fine yesterday.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5735665/Clicking Hard drive/clicking hard drives.wma

Download that and tell me thats normal.... :(
You start to hear the clicks at around the 5 second mark, and they continue on
 
Update:

Well, I ran a WD Diagnostics check and got this:

uhoh.jpg


Ran a test on each drive individually however, and both said that they had too many bad sectors, so phoned Western Digital who confirmed that because I'm running on a RAID 1 array, one drive has copied over bad sectors to the other drive as well.
The only way to test them? Write zeros to both, and then re-install each individually it would seem.

I'm just...giving up now.
These new drives were meant to be a refresh to everything since I had suffered from a bad drive on the last build, so I had just gotten everything up and running, and then this.
I guess that's the problem when most of your hobbies need a PC; music and 3D modeling.
 
Perhaps the environment where you keep your system is not conducive to your drive's longevity. Maybe there is vibration, heat, humidity or some other environmental issue. I have quite a few systems I run and I haven't had a drive failure in about 5 years.
 
I've had my fair share fail. On this build and others.

It would seem since switching to RAID, I've had far more go, but the reason I switched to RAID 1 in the first place, was because with an older build, a hard drive failed losing all data.
Okay, and one drive went after around 4 months, because my older power supply blew up, and that was a pretty good one too.

Only thing I could think of would be the electric lines in the house, but I'm running on surge protectors.

Plus apart from the power supply and hard drives, everything else has ran fine. I don't have problems with the CPU or graphics card.
I have had problems with my RAM though too if I'm honest. I lost two sticks when the power supply decided to burn out.

These 2 hard drives though are new.

My friend thinks its a sign to change. That maybe what I do isn't what I need to be doing.
It doesn't help I'm quite down at the moment, over other things. This has just added to it.
 
For grins, have you ever tried new data cables?

Probably not the news you would want to hear, but I've seen a few cases where the SATA controllers went bad making good drives appears, and act, as if they were bad. The entire Sandybridge can be cited as an example for this. What's the chance you happen to have another computer you could plug one or both of those drives in for a little bit to see how they behave?
 
Chances are very slim indeed :(
I may have to forget all about RAID. It's not been giving me much luck, and somehow I agree that running on RAID 1 has in fact been the down fall with the drives I've had.
After my power supply went, I also lost 2 sticks of RAM. This build has been a bit meh overall.
Think I built it in 2006
 
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