I think my Barracuda may be fried...help!

[Promit]

On Friday, I had a fairly severe hard drive crash involving corruption of files and such, but apparently no hard damage, just soft failure. Afterwards, I had a lot of frustration trying to get the system set up -- a brand new install of WinXP would implode for no apparent reason.

So, after rewriting the partition table and starting over completely, things seemed to be in order, until just now. I was thinking everything was alright, until I fired up Half Life 2. Lots of stuttering and such (with a gig of RAM, A64, etc). Starting to get a little suspicious of the drive again. So I download and fire up SiSoft Sandra and run a filesystem benchmark, which takes just under an hour. The result? My drive index is ~3.75 MB/s. Miserably low. Half the speed of an ATA 33 drive.

What's going on? Is this drive toast, or is something else wrong?

 

[mechBgon]

Some specs on your system could help here. Also, do you have firewall protection (a router between your computer and your broadband modem is a good start, and/or a software firewall), and what Service Pack is your Windows at? Have you checked that your disk controller is using an UltraDMA mode rather than PIO mode (PIO = bad), and have you run Seagate SeaTools diagnostics yet?