Need help determining if there is a problem with my new hard drive.

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berlin88

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Oct 23, 2009
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I just got a new hard drive last night (1TB Caviar Black) to replace an old 1TB Caviar Black, that had developed some bad sectors.

When I initially installed the new drive and loaded Windows 7 on it, everything seemed to be working ok. After loading Windows, I ran HD Tune Pro 5.50 and HDDLife Pro 4.0.192. Initially, everything looked great. HDD Life rated my new drive as excellent (100%).

Tonight however, some of the numbers I was getting on HD Tune Pro and HDDLife have changed. HDD Life now lists my new drive at 83%, as opposed to the 100% score it was previously giving me.

For HD Tune Pro, the spinup time has gone from 100 current to 170 current, and 253 worst to 170 worst. The spinup time data has gone from 0 to 2483, but I would assume that data number is normal.

Three pictures show the drive results for HD Tune Pro and HHD Life Pro from Saturday night, and the other two picks are from Sunday night.

I should also mention, that when I got the initial results, I had not yet reconnected my other drives. It was after reconnecting my other drives, that I got a permanent change in the performance numbers via HD Tune Pro and HDD Life Pro. I tried disconnecting my other drives, but I was still getting different numbers than I had originally on Saturday night.

Lastly, I have An AMD 8320 and ASRock 990FX Extreme 4 for my board / CPU, which are about a month old now.









 
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fzabkar

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Sep 22, 2010
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SMART data need to be accumulated over a sufficient time before they can be considered to be statistically significant. Usually when the normalised value is 253, this means that insufficient data have been recorded by the drive.

For example, would it be meaningful to report a Spin Up Time if the drive hasn't yet been spun up? Or would it be meaningful to report an error rate of 100%, and therefore a drive failure, if there was a read error on the very first read? Would it not make more sense to read one million sectors and then calculate an error rate?
 
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berlin88

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Oct 23, 2009
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I understand what you are saying, but the performance numbers were constant until after I reconnected my other drives, which is when they changed for the worse. HDD life rated my drive at 100% prior to reconnecting my other drives, so what could have changed in that brief period, so that it is now rating at only 84%? The numbers in HD Tune Pro were also constant for roughly 24 hours prior to changing.

The new drive was running by itself problem free for nearly a full day with no changes recorded by HD Tune Pro and HDD Life Pro. However, immediately after reconnecting my other 2 drives, the performance numbers did change noticeably.

If you go by averages, how does the drive go from 100% to 83%, when you had roughly 24 hours of it running at 100%, compared to mere minutes running at 83%?

When I discovered HD Tune cPro and HHD Life Pro were giving new numbers, I disconnected the older drives and went back to a single drive, but the numbes didn't revert back to what they were before.

In addition to all that, ever since I tried running both the new drive and the old ones simultaneously, the new drive has been making an audible noise when it spins up / starts up. That noiser was not there before.
 
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fzabkar

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Sep 22, 2010
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HDDLife is misinterpreting the SMART data. Its author doesn't understand your drive's SMART values.

If you run HD Sentinel against your drive, you will probably see a 100% health score.

By way of example, Seagate drives begin life with a normalised value of 100 for the Seek Error Rate (SER) attribute. After the drive records 1 million seeks, the drive only then begins to calculate the SER. At this time, if there have been no seek errors, the SER value will drop from 100 to 60. That's still a perfect error-free score, but some SMART software may not understand this peculiar behaviour and will raise a false alarm.
 
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