delayed write failure in SATA drive

[kcbass]

This mroning my computer started reporting a delayed write failure in one of my HDD's...It's the only SATA drive in my system, and it's only 4 months old. What does a delayed write failure indicate? I went into the disk management utility in my computer, and the disk is no longer there even though i can see it in my computer.

Any ideas on what's wrong?

 

[SocrPlyr]

two options
drive became disconnected
or it is dying

shut down the computer, check the cables (just unplug them and plug them back in, both power and SATA)
boot the machine up
see if the drive is working... if it is backup whatever you can... if not try restarting a couple of times...
if that doesn't no bring it up the drive is probably dead and you need a replacement....
also just for the heck of it a different SATA port might help...

(my guess would be that your drive is dead/dying)

Josh

 

[kcbass]

That's not good news....I've had my other three IDE's for over three years now, and they're still running fine...I did find out that it's a Western Digital. It shipped with a 30 day warranty from the retail company, but would Western Digital replace it under their warranty? It's a 250 GB drive, and it's only got 6.45GB free, so backing it up really isn't an option....When I restarted, it did an automatic disk check (the 3 step process), and now it appears in the disk management, but it says Healthy (at risk) under the status...What does this mean?

Next time I restart I'll check the connections on this drive and let you know.

 

[kcbass]

bump

 

[kcbass]

I tried to defrag the drive in question, and the program can't see the disk...Like I said, inside disk management, it says Healthy(At Risk), and it also says Online(Errors). Does WD supply a disk checking/repairing utility that WILL NOT erase data from the disk?

 

[kcbass]

really need help with this...any advice?

 

[istolyar]

Some SATA drives have problems with vibration. Performance of drives extremely drop when vibration level high. This problem you can see especially in 1u servers. Be make sure that your fans not create this problem. If it 1u server try to loose them to absorb vibration.

 

[kcbass]

It's not in a server....it's just a full tower desktop. The SATA is mounted in one of the 5.25" bays, and it's pretty secure.

 

[kcbass]

I'm not really sure what to do.....should I just keep using the drive like nothing's wrong? (I can still read/write from it, i just can't defrag it and sometimes it gives me error messages) Should I contact WD and see if they can ship me a replacement? Does WD have utilities on their site that can repair the drive without erasing my data? I've never had a HDD fail on me after 4 months of using it (especially when it's the largest drive I own and I can't back up the data on it...) 

 

[edelbrock]

If the data is really important to you, I would recommend buying another drive and transfering the data. Sounds pretty risky using that drive if the data is important.

 

[kcbass]

It's not critical data, it's just TV episodes and such (all legal). They took a long time to gather, and I'd rather not lose them...money's kinda tight, so if I can fix the drive, I'd rather do that. 

 

[kcbass]

I checked on WD's support site and found the data lifeguard diagnostic program...it says it can repair a bad drive, but doesn't mention wheter or not the data on the drive stays intact. Anyone know if that program's repair feature overwrites the data, or tries to save it? 

 

[kcbass]

bump 

 

[alienb]

it'll usually overwrite it. Your drive is most likely dead, and I doubt a utility could fix it, as it's probably a hardware component failure...

 

[Antoneo]

Wait, not so fast guys.

To make things clear, I don't have SATA drive. But I have had the problems kcbass has indicated on my computer with 3 PATA Seagate 200GBs. The delayed write failures occured on only one of the drives though. The rest of them "appeared" to have errors from diagnostics. The delayed write failures did not crop up at first but several months later with increased disk usage, specifically eMule though I would not be surprised if BT would have exhibited similar behavior.

Are you running a RAID controller? My onboard Highpoint IDE RAID controller was at fault. Updating the bios made the diagnostic errors go away but the delayed write failures remained. Crappy firmware/drivers was my first thought but it boiled down to the controller itself. A very common problem too so I switched my drives over to a PCI Promise IDE card.

Try running the diagnotistic utility with the check (no fix) option only. I know SeaTools works like that, and it can probably be used to scan WD disks as well. When the results for me came back clean, I knew it had to be the controller. If that's the case with you, try updating the bios on the motherboard. It saved me from not only RMAing the drives, but the painful "putting the gigabytes of data somewhere/anywhere" process. Good luck!

 

[kcbass]

It is running through a raid controller, although I have raid disabled (i've only got the one drive), because the raid controllers are the only available SATA slots on my board. I updated the BIOS a few months back, so I probably still have the most up to date version. Where can I get a copy of SeaTools to check my drive? 

 

[kcbass]

bump 

 

[Antoneo]

http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

 

[kcbass]

Thanks for the link. I'm in the middle of my finals schedule, so it may take me a while to try this out. I'll let you know

 

[kcbass]

Well, I tried the data lifeguard tools, since it was written specifically for WD drives, and the drive was so messed up that it failed before the test even began. It then directed me to the page for RMA's with the S/N of the drive and the error code, so I went ahead and submitted an RMA....I just hope the replacement drive lasts longer....up until now, I've never had a hard drive fail, and the 80 gig drives I use are over 3 years old....

 

[glugglug]

3rd option: VIA drivers suck. Got these all the time on my 1GHz Athlon, getting rid of VIA drivers & using the standard Win2K ones fixed it. Could be sucky drivers for your RAID controller. Network access to the drive tended to make the problem crop up much more, particularly when the "network" access is to a VMWare session running on the same machine.

 

[kcbass]

And on top of this problem, my computer is now consistently freezing with a video error on startup....it looks kinda like a television test patter (the one with all the different colored vertical bars....) except it's got a lot more colors.....i think it's the vid card, but I can't tell for sure.

 

[Vegito]

i had delay write on my server, bad controller, swap out the controller and it went away.. if ur also getting vid prob, it might be the motherboard.. you can try a different sata connector + cable

 

[kcbass]

Unfortunately, I only have the one stat controller built onto my mobo. I've tried disabling it, but the video problem remains. My theory is that the video card is dying....It's pretty old and I want to get the new ATI AIW x800 XT, but it hasn't been released yet. 

 

[kcbass]

glugglug, I tried to switch out the via driver with the winxp driver, but i couldn't find it. Any ideas on where I should look? I tried to do the search for compatible drivers, but I never found one.