Delayed Write Failure error on WD 3200KS SATA II

[opuntia]

I?m getting ?Delayed Write Failure? warning on my WD CaviarSE16 WD3200KS SATA II drive. I use this drive for data storage and I have a WD Raptor 74GB for OS & programs. The rest of my system is in my sig.

I?ve had the system for over a month now with no problems. However, just yesterday, while trying to copy large data over the network from a laptop to the WD3200KS drive on the PC I kept on getting a ?Delayed Write Failure? message. The PC would lock up for about a minute and work again for about 30 seconds and lock up again. When I would restart the PC, everything would be fine until I start to write to that drive again, even when copying between the two hard drives. I was able to copy a 4GB file over the network to the Raptor drive without any problems. I replaced the cable, and the powersupply connection, same problems. I also ran Memtest overnight and no errors.

I?ve disconnected the drive for now. I was going to install the WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic program, but I get an error message during the install because I don?t have the D: drive. I going to put the drive in and try the program again.

Basically, anybody have any idea what the problem could be? I?ve read about disabiling the ?write cache? setting under the drive properties, but that doesn?t seem right. Could it just be a bad drive? Also, if I?m able to run the Diagnostic program, is there anything that I should try or look out for?

Thanks in advance for your comments.

-Matt

 

[Tostada]

Sounds like it's probably just a bad drive. You might just run the diagnostic program and it'll tell you there are errors and then you'll RMA it... but I'd wait till you run the program to speculate.

The only time I've gotten a "Delayed Write Failure" when it wasn't a bad drive it was a SCSI system with several drives and an inadequate PSU and an incorrectly terminated LVD cable. Every time I've gotten it on an ATA drive it's just been a drive with bad sectors.

You've gotta watch out for some of those diagnostic programs, though. I think Hitachis is really obnoxious. If you have bad sectors, it will format the drive and rewrite the error table then tell you the drive is in perfect shape, and then Hitachi won't let you RMA it. But Hitachi has the worst RMA policy of anybody I've ever dealt with.

 

[opuntia]

Thanks for the reply,

Part of me hopes it's just a bad drive and not some funky driver/software/setting issue. Just broke, plain and simple. But then the problem is I need to somehow recover my 6000+ mp3 and digital photos (Luckly I still have 95% of them on my old hard drive on my old pc)

 

[Nocturnal]

With WD you can download their Windows based diagnostic tool and run a scan on the hard drive. I'd also recommend performing a chkdsk to see where that stands.

 

[opuntia]

Thanks for the replies.

I had the drive installed on another machine and everything was fine. No errors with WD diagnostics or SMART. Was able to Ghost an image with no freezes, therefore, all this means that it might be the MB or some software/OS conflict....

...on that note, I just noticed for the first time that when rebooting my PC, a message comes up before the BIOS screen asking to install the Silicon Image SATA RAID driver. Checking the BIOS, this option is enabled, it was disabled, so I might have enabled it by mistake and now it's causing some kind of conflict with the drive (though not with my 80GB raptor), since I'm using the chipset (nvidia) SATA driver.

I don't have my drive right now to reinstall, but I'll post what happens.

 

[opuntia]

It turns out that it's an OC issue and probably a hardware problem. I've been OCing using these settings (as recommended by OCZ - 3rd post) for the past month with no problems. And now first it was the hard drive and now the whole system freezes when I OC. If I turn off the OC, no problem. I've run memtest with no OC and everything checks out. Should I try memtest at the OC settings?

This all leads me to believe that something is wrong with either the powersupply, the motherboard, or the CPU. Is there someway to test these components without buying new components and doing the process of elimination thing?

Any reply would be great. Thanks!

 

[xtknight]

I've gotten delayed write failures because I had changed some paging executive option in the registry.

As for the OCing, your IDE ports are probably not being locked (they are instead being synchronized with the FSB which can be possibly damaging depending on the extent). How to lock them? I don't know, it's different for every mobo. I've heard using nForce 4 controller ports 3&4 instead will do it or something. Best to ask in the motherboard forum or search there for your mobo.

 

[opuntia]

Originally posted by: xtknight
I've gotten delayed write failures because I had changed some paging executive option in the registry.

As for the OCing, your IDE ports are probably not being locked (they are instead being synchronized with the FSB which can be possibly damaging depending on the extent). How to lock them? I don't know, it's different for every mobo. I've heard using nForce 4 controller ports 3&4 instead will do it or something. Best to ask in the motherboard forum or search there for your mobo.

Thanks. What kind of damage can be done? I"m pretty sure my HD is fine.

I just uninstalled the Nvidia IDE controller becuase I've read some have had issues with this driver. I just don't understand how I could be OCing for a month with no problems and then this all of a sudden.

I've been trying lots of different things trying to pinpoint this down...thank god for XP system restore.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: opuntia
Thanks. What kind of damage can be done? I"m pretty sure my HD is fine.

Possibly data corruption. I screwed over my system by not locking the SATA bus I'm fairly sure. It did have serious partition errors (all of which were fixed by the chkdsk thorough fix option). Don't mean to 'scare' you but just take that as a word of caution.

 

[opuntia]

xtknight,

Thanks for the replies. You said that you don't know how to lock the IDE ports, but do you know how to tell if they are open?

 

[opuntia]

It turns out I had a bad powersupply...it died a couple of night ago. I installed a seasonic s12 600W and everything is working fine. So far the OC seems stable and I'm not getting any delayed write errors or locking computers. Thanks for everybody's response.

 

[opuntia]

Well, I spoke to soon. I should of waiting a couple more minutes before my last post. The problem happened again.

I've been tinkering around for the past couple of days and I think I've found the "problem". The 320GB SATAII disk is the one giving me the issues, well, I just set the jumper settings to 5-6 which forces the HD to 150MB/sec and it seems to be stable. I've been OC for a couple of hours now and transfering files back and forth so far no freezing.

Does anybody know if SATAII HD's need the nforce chipset IDE driver in order to run these disks at SATAII? To be honest, I don't really notice a speed decrease at the 150MB/s setting.