HDD click of doom dilema

[scaryjeff]

I have a 5400rpm, 60 gig Maxtor drive that has served me well for 2 years. However, while running a virus scan yesterday, the drive started to make the click of doom. Can I RMA a drive that has not actually failed but that is about to? Does this clicking definately mean that the drive will soon die? I have removed it from my PC hoping that if I do not use it at all now, It will have enough life left in it to copy all the files somewhere before it does finally die. I always thought Maxtor are meant to be pretty good, but this is the second Maxtor drive that I have had that has become faulty (the first one suddenly started failing the s.m.a.r.t test). Also, am I likely to get a Quantum drive as a replacement? They did this with the other drive and I wasn't overly impressed by the fact that a drive that died whilst in warranty was replaced by an inferior model.

The other option I have is just buying a new drive and backing up all my files on that, however, I would want to get a SATA drive to go in the new PC that im going to get in Febuary, but my current motherboard doesn't support SATA. I have seen adapters to plug PATA into SATA, is there an adapter that would let me plug a SATA drive into PATA? I also considered just getting a PATA one anyway: How much better is a 80 gig SATA drive compared to an equivelant PATA model? When I get my new PC, is a SATA drive going to make a noticable real world difference over a PATA one?

Thanks for any ideas or help.

 

[jwocky]

I'm using a SATA adapter on my motherboard which doesn't support SATA also. I don't have a 80gig SATA drive, I have the 37gig WD Raptor which I run all applications from and it runs significantly faster than when I had my WD 80gig 7200rpm drive as the master drive (which is now my slave drive). The SATA controller I use is the Promise SATA150 TX2plus card. Easy to install and affordable. Good luck!

 

[Ionizer86]

Keep the data safe (send to a network PC, burn it down, etc). Run the Maxtor Powmax test. If it fails, you can RMA right now.

Stick to PATA for now. It's cheaper and not slower.

 

[scaryjeff]

OK, thanks. I don't want to buy a SATA adapter card because I am getting a new PC in 3 months, by adapter I meant one of those small things thayt just lets you plug a PATA drive into a SATA cable. I guess I'll have a look at some sata/pata comparisons.

 

[MDE]

If the thing is clicking, record the sound and play it back on the phone when you call Maxtor... they'll RMA it without questions.

 

[scaryjeff]

I'm seeing some good improvements going from the diamondmax plus9 to the sata version (both 8 meg cache). Is this just because of the interface, or is the sata drive actually faster? If I were to connect the pata version to a sata controller using an adapter, would it bring the speed up to about the level of the sata version?

 

[zephyrprime]

Just run some HD benchmarks. That'll push it over the edge and kill it.

 

[JaydenChris]

My 40GB Maxtor clicked on me too. All I did was go to the Maxtor website and enter in the sn # to see if it was still under warranty (which it was)...clicked on the option that "the hard drive is making noise" gave a credit card # for collatoral...and they shipped me a new hard drive that arrived within a couple of days. Then all I had to do was send the bad hard drive back to Maxtor.

Simple and painless process...IF your hard drive is still under warranty.

Hope my story helped...

 

[scaryjeff]

Thats interesting JaydenChris, when the other drive died, I had to send my broken one to them, and only when they got that did they send me the replacement... If I could get the replacement first then I could easily transfer my files onto it before sending the clicking one back. I think I will wait for Maxtor tech support to reply to me either today or tomorow. The drive is deffinately still in warranty.

 

[scaryjeff]

Well they got back to me without answering any of my questions and telling me to do a low level format :/ Looks like I will have to get a new PATA drive.