Need advice on possible bad harddrive - WD RMA

[Bryson777]

To make a long story short I was having lots of problems with my main 1tb WD caviar black drive. My main OS partition got corrupted and refused to boot into windows. I originally had 9 pending bad sectors then after running HDD regenerator I had 9 uncorrectable bad sectors and after running WD DLG I now have 4 uncorrectable bad sectors. I need to note that before running HDD regenerator WD DLG completely failed the tests so as a precaution I also changed ports and sata cables and have been running with the drive for the past few days.

Here is the complication. I applied for an advanced RMA because I was convinced the drive was bad and I was lured by the prospect of getting a newer drive with 64megs cache and 500gigs/platter. Miy drive is old and only has 32megs cache. I have not even opened the box yet because I have also read of people getting refurbs that break down a couple of months later.

Thing is I need all my sata ports so how do I know if my sata port is bad, or cable or harddrive? Should I go ahead and open the box or send it back to WD?

 

[rsutoratosu]

they are all refurbs when you do warranty exchange, up to you on what you want to do , but you probably need another pc to test your drives

 

[Bryson777]

why would i need another pc to test my drives? all of my other drives are working fine. should I plug the drive back into the original sata port and cable and see if it works or should I run a surface scan using hd tune or something like that?

 

[Elixer]

Use crystaldiskinfo (free) to check the SMART of the HD in question.
If that looks OK... then try the original SATA port again, and see if it makes any difference.
If it does, then you got a bad/failing SATA port. If it now works OK, then most likely a bad cable, or gremlins.

Since you got a refurb drive from WD, you could just use that, and give them back your HD, or not... I am not to thrilled on refurbs, even if they are supposedly checked and re-checked. I have just seen too many of these fail in a few months or earlier, but this has been with some Seagate HDs, not WD.

 

[Bryson777]

I agree about Crystal Disk Info. I love that program.

Anyways the drive I got is indeed refurbished. My drive has 28,000 hours and the refurb one has 23,000 but the rest of the Smart data has been reset. I cloned my drive onto the new one and running side by side the refurb runs almost 10 degrees cooler. My 500gb caviar black drive also runs pretty hot. I wonder if dust build up has anything to do with it? I read that there is a small filtered hole in the HDD and I'm wondering if it might be blocked?

 

[tomt4535]

The hole is more for air pressure inside of the HD rather than for cooling purposes. If there are more platters in the old drive, its probably going to run hotter than a drive with less platters. I wouldn't worry too much about it. At least you got a replacement and got all your data off it.