Delayed write failed: Bad hard drive or bad controller card?

[sctakeshi]

The problem with my F: drive started when I was trying to render a Quicktime file in Premiere. I had rendered tons of movies before this point, but now it just failed in the middle, and I got a "Delayed write failed" error, as seen here:
http://www.chadypu.com/escee/delayed_write_failed.JPG
(bottom-right of picture)

Ever since then, this error has recurred. I used this drive for backup, digital video, and my Internet cache. So after this error started occuring, when I would do a backup to it, it would go along just fine for a while (successfully backing up several files to the drive) and then fail, producing that error message. If I left my Internet cache on the F: drive, every so often during web browsing that error would be produced.

I have no problem reading from the drive; it is only writing that creates a problem, and not all the time, but frequently enough to make the drive useless for backups, the Cache, or video rendering.

I have three hard drives in this computer, and the other two are connected directly to the motherboard. The F: drive (a Western Digital WD2000JB) is connected via a Promise Ultra100 TX2 PCI IDE controller.

The IDE controller is only about two months old, while the hard drive itself is about a year old.

Does this seem more like a problem with the controller card or the hard drive itself? I need to know which one to replace.

 

[PCHPlayer]

Get the WD hard drive diagnostic tool. See what it reports.
I had the same issue with a Maxtor, the diag program said everything was fine, but it would not format. I did a quick low-level format and has worked ever since.

 

[iamtrout]

On my silicon image controller card I got the same error but only while transferring fairly large files > 1GB.

I used Medley SilConfig to change the UDMA from 6 to 5, which solved the problem completely. If there's an application that can do this for your promise card, you should look into it.