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Bad blocks caused by enclosure?

S

syee

Senior member
Is anyone using a Seagate 7200.8 or 7200.9 in an enclosure?

I'm beginning to think my enclosure is crap and causing the disk to develop bad blocks. Here's what I go:

Enclosure:
ADS Tech USBX-833 enclosure (it's an ATA enclosure)

Hard drives:
Originally had a Seagate 7200.9 250GB HD in there. Seemed to work for about 6-7 months, then stopped being recognized by the OS. A scan on Seagate's online testing tool gives me a SMART error on the drive. I send it back via warranty. Seagate takes about a month and a half to send me new drive.

I get the new drive a few days ago (7200.8 / 250GB), and put it in my enclosure. I fire it up. Seems good at first. Copy my data back onto the drive, and seems to be working fine for 2 days...then I get the clicking sound like the head is beating itself against something, then it's not recognized anymore.

I plug it directly into my IDE connection in my PC, and it gets recognized right away. Chkdsk sees bad blocks after doing a check on boot up. "Fixes" them and marks them bad. However, this is a fresh RMA drive - it shouldn't have bad blocks.

I'm just wondering - do I have a crappy enclosure that messing up my drives? I figure ADS is a pretty reputable company and this should be better than a crappy ebay enclosure.

It's connected to external power through a power brick so it's not draining the USB for power.

What do you guys think? You think 2 bad HD's or bad enclosure?
 
I don't think I've seen bad blocks caused by an enclosure but I've certainly seen them lose data, erase partitions, or cause the system to BSOD/fail to boot. I'd say RMA the drive again, and get an Adaptec enclosure if you're worried about it.
 
It's half and half. I believe Seagate gave you a refurb. drive back and those are usually not that great. I have seen one came back and the board fried during the initial quick format test; they gave me a new drive instead. ADS Tech enclosures are not that great either and that could be why your drive fail initially as well. We used them for about 4 months and we stop using them after 8% of the 1000 enclosures failed upon delivery with the 160/200/250/300 gig drives. They work fine with the 40/80 gigs.
 
It CAN be an enclosure.. I bought 2 cheap plastic USB enclosures on CompGeeks.com for like $15. Put a WD250Gb in each.. Within a week both drives were burned out completely... I had to trash the drives and send the enclosures back. A bad PSU or inadequate cooling can cause your drive to die.. if the enclosure is still in warranty I would exchange it or just trash it.
 
I haven't been terribly happy with reliability of IDE drives in USB external enclosures. Many acquaintances (all IT consultants) have had the same experiences.

I don't know for sure if it's a problem with overheating (likely) or something else. I do recommend that you use enclosures with a fan.
 
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