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Brand-new Seagate 500GB SATA disk takes five hours to check?

mikeymikec

mikeymikec

Lifer
I did a full chkdsk on this drive. SATA2-capable machine, WinXP (Athlon 64 X2, loads of RAM, no hardware issues that I'm aware of). Up to phase 4 of the checking process took hardly any time at all, but it took ages on the free space check (admittedly the drive is mostly empty, and it has been a while since I ran a disk check on a desktop disk this size, but I would expect it to take an hour or less I think).

The disk check came out fine, no serious problems. Up-to-date chipset drivers (nforce 570 SLI). Using the quick benchmark that comes with those drivers (in Device Manager), it gave me reasonable interface/burst/transfer speed figures, and reported the drive as running in SATA2 mode.

Does anyone else think that this is a bit odd? I didn't have any problems doing a fresh install of XP on it and it boots up perfectly quickly.

I think I'll run a full SeaTools check on it as well.
 
Your disk is fine. What is with the addiction to 'check' it over and over? Youre going to 'check' it into an early grave. Let it be or get another for RAID1 if youre really scared of a bad drive. Windows does a pretty good job of telling you when shit is going down, and keep your eye on the SMART readings once in a while.
 
I've checked it once. I'm missing the bit I wrote that suggests that I have an addiction to disk-checking. I thought about running a different check on it because I wasn't sure that it acted normally during the first check, but first I thought I'd ask here to see whether that's what other people would expect as well.

So, "my disk is fine", because?
 
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mikeymikec said:
I've checked it once. I'm missing the bit I wrote that suggests that I have an addiction to disk-checking. I thought about running a different check on it because I wasn't sure that it acted normally during the first check, but first I thought I'd ask here to see whether that's what other people would expect as well.

So, "my disk is fine", because?
Click to expand...

Because it passed. Things like Chkdsk and some of the SSD tune up tools are more for checking a drive when you have issues. He is probably tired of the I ran "AS SSD today and lost like 2MB/s, should I format" type posts.

As for the scan time. Well yeah that sounds about right. Chkdsk is slooooow, it will always be slooooow, more space more sectors, equals taking a vacation to Florida if you want to scan a 3 TB HDD.

It's fine testing a drive when you first get it but don't let the idea creep in that you need to check it every couple days/months to make sure nothing is going wrong. It's there as a tool to diagnose an issue and not a great tool for status checks.
 
Yes, the CHKDSK free space check runs pretty slowly, for a large drive. That sounds normal, really.

Using the mfg's bootable diagnostic disc to do a surface scan and a SMART self-test is generally faster, and probably more accurate too.
 
mikeymikec said:
Down to 1 year certainly on the 500GB 3.5" SATA model, probably for all of their range except retail/XT/hybrid versions.

Congratulations Seagate, I won't be buying those any more, as Samsung/WD still do three-year warranties.
Click to expand...
Which Seagate 500GB model did you buy?
 
VirtualLarry said:
Yes, the CHKDSK free space check runs pretty slowly, for a large drive. That sounds normal, really.

Using the mfg's bootable diagnostic disc to do a surface scan and a SMART self-test is generally faster, and probably more accurate too.
Click to expand...

How is that more accurate ? There have been many failures, and SMART didn't show any advanced warning at all.
They all pretty much use the same software these days to perform dianostics.

SMART is a very minimal diagnostic test.

It is wise to do a full format on a new HD (yeah, it takes hours on bigger HDs), instead of doing a quick format. That tends to find the glaring issues quickly. That is how I found issues with a samsung & seagate HDs.
 
"more accurate", meaning that the mfg diagnostic program can return certain error codes, which may have more meaning, and if they detect bad sectors, they can often offer to fix them (remap them), whereas windows' CHKDSK will probably just blindly mark them bad.
 
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