Need 2nd opinion on potentially faulty HDDs

214 Views 1 Reply 2 Participants Last post by Kramy, Jul 17, 2011

m$_is_not_the_answer

Discussion Starter · #1 · Jul 16, 2011

Hey OCN! It's been a few years but I'm back with a question:

I bought two 1.5TB Seagate drives a little less than a month ago. I'm using them in a RAID1 with a 3rd disk as the OS drive. Literally within hours of setting up the RAID i restarted (for an update or something) and when it's booting up I get the RAID status screen and it says the RAID volume is degraded, one of the disks has an error. I go to seagate's website, download SeaTools for DOS and run the long tests (on both drives). They turn up nothing. I delete the RAID volume I made (nothing on it yet) and recreate it, load up everything as I originally intended and think nothing of the incident.

Fast forward to last night and Intel Matrix Storage Manager on the comp says the volume is degraded. I open up the control panel and it says BOTH drives have failed. ***. I reboot and check the RAID screen after BIOS and it says only one of the drives is failed now. I'm currently running SeaTools again, hasn't found anything yet.

So what happens if the tests don't find anything again? Should I just RMA the drives (if I can)? Two issues in less than one month does not instill much confidence.

Relevant Info:
ASUS Commando using onboard RAID controller
Win7 x64

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Kramy

· Premium Member

Joined May 28, 2005

·

9,545 Posts

#2 · Jul 17, 2011

No, it certainly doesn't instill much confidence. I would certainly be considering returning them.

But before you do that... I spotted another thread today: http://www.overclock.net/hard-drives-storage/1067827-hotfix-storage-drive-vanishing-after-s3.html

If the drive disappeared from Windows, the drivers would definitely mark the array as failed, so it's worth looking into. Since the SeaTools SMART tests are not failing, you should investigate other software causes first. Also, make sure Windows is set to not spin down the disks. (Control panel, Power options)

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