How do you test a SATA drive?

[Seekermeister]

I have a pair of Maxtor SATAs which I want to test. But PowerMax is unable to do so, it can't even see then on a motherboard with a VIA chipset. Now since Maxtor so graciously upgrade both PowerMax and MaxBlast, they can't even test the IDE drives. WDC's Lifeguard can see and run the tests on the IDEs but it can't see the SATAs either. Everest see all of the drives, but only reads the Smart on the IDEs. Belard Advisor pronounces the IDE drives as healthy, but only lists the SATAs. I was going to check Sandra, but "she" wouldn't get out of bed. So what's left...anything?

 

[Seekermeister]

Should I take it then, that there is no way to test SATAs?

 

[corkyg]

No - you test a SATA drive the same way you test a PATA drive or a SCSI drive. You test performance. The test program doesn't care how it is connected. I have used this for a couple of years.

Test

 

[Seekermeister]

Thanks for the link, but since I'm merely a home user, I'll pass. I realize that I'm cheap, but I do not want to buy a program, when there should be free diagnostics available from the manufacturers. I did find SeaTools and ran it, and what little information that it provided, made it appear that the harddrives were okay...at least it could see the SATAs, which is more than PowerMax and Lifeguard could do. But, it could not run the tests that I'm accustomed to with PowerMAX with IDE drives. It merely gave an abbreviated SMART reading on them.

Since it appears that the problem is elsewhere, it must be the motherboard, or possibly the PS. Something that I thought was curious, was that the bios post indicated that it was detecting the primary master/slave drives, but only listed the secondary slave, which is the one that doesn't work...no mention of secondary master.

I realized later that I messed up on the uninstall/install of the video driver and will have to do it again, but I do not believe that it could be the cause of these other problems. I'm still as confused as at the beginning.

 

[Nocturnal]

At work I normally use the Hitachi Diagnostic Tools CD to run scans if I think a hard drive is failing. You can download the .ISO from Hitachi's website. Just do a Google search for Hitachi Diagnostics. From there, just burn the .ISO and boot from that CD. Do an Advance scan and not the quick as sometimes the quick scan doesn't pick up the errors that the Advance does.

 

[Nocturnal]

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
Thanks for the link, but since I'm merely a home user, I'll pass. I realize that I'm cheap, but I do not want to buy a program, when there should be free diagnostics available from the manufacturers. I did find SeaTools and ran it, and what little information that it provided, made it appear that the harddrives were okay...at least it could see the SATAs, which is more than PowerMax and Lifeguard could do. But, it could not run the tests that I'm accustomed to with PowerMAX with IDE drives. It merely gave an abbreviated SMART reading on them.

Since it appears that the problem is elsewhere, it must be the motherboard, or possibly the PS. Something that I thought was curious, was that the bios post indicated that it was detecting the primary master/slave drives, but only listed the secondary slave, which is the one that doesn't work...no mention of secondary master.

I realized later that I messed up on the uninstall/install of the video driver and will have to do it again, but I do not believe that it could be the cause of these other problems. I'm still as confused as at the beginning.

When I see this at work, I usually check the jumpers that are on the master/slave drive. Sometimes even if you have it set to cable select, motherboards are picky and don't work quite well. I usually just set it to master/slave. Try that and see if that helps. Otherwise, I would take one drive at a time. Remove the slave or master and try scanning it that way.

 

[Seekermeister]

Originally posted by: Nocturnal
At work I normally use the Hitachi Diagnostic Tools CD to run scans if I think a hard drive is failing. You can download the .ISO from Hitachi's website. Just do a Google search for Hitachi Diagnostics. From there, just burn the .ISO and boot from that CD. Do an Advance scan and not the quick as sometimes the quick scan doesn't pick up the errors that the Advance does.

If it can see SATAs and test them, then it is what I need. Thanks.

 

[Nocturnal]

Originally posted by: Seekermeister

Originally posted by: Nocturnal
At work I normally use the Hitachi Diagnostic Tools CD to run scans if I think a hard drive is failing. You can download the .ISO from Hitachi's website. Just do a Google search for Hitachi Diagnostics. From there, just burn the .ISO and boot from that CD. Do an Advance scan and not the quick as sometimes the quick scan doesn't pick up the errors that the Advance does.

If it can see SATAs and test them, then it is what I need. Thanks.

I've ran tests on numerous SATA drives with no problems. Good luck.

 

[Seekermeister]

Originally posted by: Nocturnal

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
Thanks for the link, but since I'm merely a home user, I'll pass. I realize that I'm cheap, but I do not want to buy a program, when there should be free diagnostics available from the manufacturers. I did find SeaTools and ran it, and what little information that it provided, made it appear that the harddrives were okay...at least it could see the SATAs, which is more than PowerMax and Lifeguard could do. But, it could not run the tests that I'm accustomed to with PowerMAX with IDE drives. It merely gave an abbreviated SMART reading on them.

Since it appears that the problem is elsewhere, it must be the motherboard, or possibly the PS. Something that I thought was curious, was that the bios post indicated that it was detecting the primary master/slave drives, but only listed the secondary slave, which is the one that doesn't work...no mention of secondary master.

I realized later that I messed up on the uninstall/install of the video driver and will have to do it again, but I do not believe that it could be the cause of these other problems. I'm still as confused as at the beginning.

When I see this at work, I usually check the jumpers that are on the master/slave drive. Sometimes even if you have it set to cable select, motherboards are picky and don't work quite well. I usually just set it to master/slave. Try that and see if that helps. Otherwise, I would take one drive at a time. Remove the slave or master and try scanning it that way.

Since this rig has been running okay for going on two years, and I didn't touch any jumpers or wires, I doubt that it is just a trait of the motherboard. But, at this point, I'll try most anything.

 

[secretanchitman]

download something called HD Tach. (its free btw)

 

[Seekermeister]

I just finished running the quick and advanced tests on all 4 harddrives, and everything was good, except the advance test for SATA Comprizing the secondary drive of my raid array. It reported an error 0X72, but I couldn't find anything about this, either at Hitachi or by Googling. Anyone haved any idea of what it means?

 

[Seekermeister]

I disconnected the combo drive, and that seemed to clear the detection delay and even the HD LED problem. Apparently, I messed up when I installed the DVD a while back, and crimped the cable between the drive bay and the drive tray. I'm assuming that the crimp produced some heat buildup which damaged the cable. At least that's alot easier and cheaper than I had imagined.

 

[Seekermeister]

Originally posted by: secretanchitman
download something called HD Tach. (its free btw)

I'm preparing to download it now. But I thought that was for benchmarking the drive, not really testing it. I suppose that a bad benchmark can be considered a test indirectly.

 

[Nocturnal]

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
I just finished running the quick and advanced tests on all 4 harddrives, and everything was good, except the advance test for SATA Comprizing the secondary drive of my raid array. It reported an error 0X72, but I couldn't find anything about this, either at Hitachi or by Googling. Anyone haved any idea of what it means?

It means the hard drive is failing. I don't know if the results would be applicable for a RAID setup but for single drives, if it scans it and comes back with an error 0x72, that means the drive is failing.

 

[Seekermeister]

Originally posted by: Nocturnal

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
I just finished running the quick and advanced tests on all 4 harddrives, and everything was good, except the advance test for SATA Comprizing the secondary drive of my raid array. It reported an error 0X72, but I couldn't find anything about this, either at Hitachi or by Googling. Anyone haved any idea of what it means?

It means the hard drive is failing. I don't know if the results would be applicable for a RAID setup but for single drives, if it scans it and comes back with an error 0x72, that means the drive is failing.

I suspect that you are right, because that is what I suspected before. But isn't there a number of possible error codes, or just this one?

 

[Seekermeister]

I finished running HD Tach, but the results confused me some. It gave the rate at 120.8 for the Maxtor IDE, 93.5 for the WDC IDE and 114.4 for the raid array. I know that SATA ll doesn't get to 300 as it should, but shouldn't the SATA l get 150 as advertised? I suppose that I could disassemble my raid array, to test the SATAs separately, and that might give a better result on SATA 0 and a worse on SATA 1, but I don't want to mess with it, unless it needs to be done.

 

[Nocturnal]

Originally posted by: Seekermeister

Originally posted by: Nocturnal

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
I just finished running the quick and advanced tests on all 4 harddrives, and everything was good, except the advance test for SATA Comprizing the secondary drive of my raid array. It reported an error 0X72, but I couldn't find anything about this, either at Hitachi or by Googling. Anyone haved any idea of what it means?

It means the hard drive is failing. I don't know if the results would be applicable for a RAID setup but for single drives, if it scans it and comes back with an error 0x72, that means the drive is failing.

I suspect that you are right, because that is what I suspected before. But isn't there a number of possible error codes, or just this one?

I'm not sure but I fix computers for a living and if and when I see the red screen with any indication of an error I automatically know that the drive is bad and if you can still get data off of it or use it it will eventually fail.

 

[Seekermeister]

I understand, but since the drive is in a raid 1 array, if it fails, I would still have everything intact on the other drive...shouldn't I? Perhaps I'm wrong, but at the moment, I'm viewing the issue in terms of array performance, rather than one endangering data. Should I alter this view?

 

[Nocturnal]

You're right, with RAID1 your data is mirrored across both drives so in case of one drive failing you can rebuilt the array and still have all the data. I don't think you have to worry that much but if it's causing problems with the rest of your system then I'd worry.

 

[Seekermeister]

I'm getting ready to order a new X2 processor, so my budget doesn't allow for replacing the harddrive right now. But, when I get the processor, I'm going to install my OEM MCE. I have delayed that, because if I understand, any hardware change will force me to revalidate the OS with MS. I have seen a chart of the point system for this for a retail XP...would this chart apply to OEM also, or is it more rigid?

 

[Seekermeister]

Researching for when I can replace the drive, I found this in regards to SATA ll drives:

Soon after SATA's introduction, enhancements were made to the standard. A 3 Gb/s signalling rate was added to the PHY layer, offering up to twice the data throughput. To ensure seamless backward compatibility between older SATA and the newer faster SATA 3.0 Gb/s devices, the latter devices are required to support the original 1.5 Gb/s rate. In practice, some older SATA systems that do not support SATA speed negotiation require the peripheral drive's speed be manually hardlimited to 150 MB/s with the use of a jumper for a 300 MB/s drive.This jumper setting is needed in the following VIA south bridges: VT8237,VT8237R,VT6420 and VT6421L.Those chips not only do not detect the hard disk drive but they do not even let the disk spin up.This behaviour is not altered even if you hack your mainboard BIOS and add the latest VIA SATA RAID ROM

Since my motherboard has the VT8237 chip, I interpret this to mean that if I bought a SATA ll, that I would have to set some kind of jumper on the drive, for it to work properly. The only reason then to buy the SATA ll, would be for when I might replace the motherboard, in the future. Or would there be any improvement with any motherboard, in terms of performance?

 

[Nocturnal]

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
Researching for when I can replace the drive, I found this in regards to SATA ll drives:

Soon after SATA's introduction, enhancements were made to the standard. A 3 Gb/s signalling rate was added to the PHY layer, offering up to twice the data throughput. To ensure seamless backward compatibility between older SATA and the newer faster SATA 3.0 Gb/s devices, the latter devices are required to support the original 1.5 Gb/s rate. In practice, some older SATA systems that do not support SATA speed negotiation require the peripheral drive's speed be manually hardlimited to 150 MB/s with the use of a jumper for a 300 MB/s drive.This jumper setting is needed in the following VIA south bridges: VT8237,VT8237R,VT6420 and VT6421L.Those chips not only do not detect the hard disk drive but they do not even let the disk spin up.This behaviour is not altered even if you hack your mainboard BIOS and add the latest VIA SATA RAID ROM

Since my motherboard has the VT8237 chip, I interpret this to mean that if I bought a SATA ll, that I would have to set some kind of jumper on the drive, for it to work properly. The only reason then to buy the SATA ll, would be for when I might replace the motherboard, in the future. Or would there be any improvement with any motherboard, in terms of performance?

Currently the performance gain you get from running a SATAII drive is slim to none if any. You're better off getting a cheaper SATAI drive and match it up nicely with the drives you already have RAIDED or plan to re-RAID.

 

[Seekermeister]

Again, I think that you are right, but I guess the reason that I was looking for alternatives is because of what looked like poor performance of the SATAs on HD Tach. For it to perform slower than my Maxtor ATA133 IDE doesn't seem right. Of course HD Tach tested the combined array, and not each drive separately, so the bad SATA may be the reason for that. Exactly what should I expect on that test with 2 good SATAs...150?

 

[Seekermeister]

While at a local computer store today, I asked about a SATA drive for a replacement. The drive that they had was a WDC OEM, which was priced cheaper than anything that I have found elsewhere. The salesman said that it carried a 3 year warranty, versus a 1 year warranty on a retail box, which is exactly the opposite of what I expected. If the OEM has a longer warranty, is there some other aspect that I need to consider? I realize that it won't have a cable or paperwork, but those I don't need.