S-ATA HDD just gone bust?

Superman

Hi,
Now i'm a bit confused about something and just need advice,
I got a 160 GB maxtor S-ata card last december, It went into a clean system i was building, 2 day's ago it started hanging going into windows,I gave a it a chkdsk with ntfschk. and it gave me loads of "unreadable file Segments" , i thought this was a bit bogie so i tried to reinstall windows, it wouldn't let me , said there was had drive errors!
So i got the maxtor tools and it gave me a message when i tested it saying i should RMA the item, now my question is if I do a low-level format should it fix the problems? cause I really don't want to RMA it and be without a drive for a month!
And is is reasonable to think that a 160gb (filled about 90gb) can go so quickly?

leeroybrown

Hard drives are consumables. They fail. Most IDE drives last for three/four/five years but some fail a lot earlier.

You could mark the bad sectors using Maxtors tools to low level format but to be honest this would be a bad idea. Once a drive has some bad blocks/sectors there is no guarantee that it will not get a lot worse.

Bite the bullet, backup your important stuff asap and arrange an RMA with whoever sold you the HDD. If you bought from Komplett or someone similar you'll probably have the replacement quickly as the test tool is saying to RMA.

BadCharlie

Any product can fail at any time " there is no set time for something to fail ". I would think you should send it back. If the maxtor tool tells you it dont work well then it dont work. Also you should try and save the data you have on the drive first " im sure you have done it all ready ". I have 2 maxtor drives one for 2 years and the other about 8months i have had no problems.

tribble

Hard drives are consumables. They fail. Most IDE drives last for three/four/five years but some fail a lot earlier.

... and some last over 16 years, like the 20 mb Connor drive I use in my oldskool machine

Frankly I'd be disgusted if any of my drives died after less than 6/7 years.
Though if you run them 24/7 I'd accept 3/4 years.
I've only had one HD die in less than 3 years, an old IBM DEATHSTAR.

That said I'd backup your data and RMA yoiur drive right now.
They tend not to last very long after they start reporting errors.
Remember that only the most serious errors are reported, most are TRANSPARENTLY marked as bad - your drive must be badly borked.

tribble

C Fodder

If a drive has started showing bad blocks or bad sectors and it's still under warranty get it swapped ASAP as it has started dying. Get your data backed up and get a replacement drive.

Superman

ok, good advice! i'm going to back up everything and probably send it back to maxtor,

but just out of curiousity does "file segment unreadable" automatically denote there is bad sectors or could it just be the data onn the segment is corrupt?

leeroybrown

If it's saying it's unreadable then that more than likely means bad blocks.

You'll probably notice a huge drop off in read performance along with a mechanical sound from your hard drive as the heads seek as it makes attempts to read from the block in question.