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so i was curious about my random c:\ drive hdd flashing* (activity or grinding, no not sounding like grinding, but working) and ran christal disk on it again. i ran it once during the summer but didn't think anything about the error below. then i re-ran it again a few minutes ago, and i am still seeing these "yellow" alerts:
Current pending sector = 1
Uncorrectable sector =1
* the flashing is the hdd activity. it is randoming doing this for several seconds or more and then stops. there is no slow down to my system that i can tell, but it is becoming annoying or curious, to the point that i should look into it and do something about it.
please note, i have no space left (aprox 280mb) so please don't recommended any suites to download and install.
what is the recommended procedure to resolve this ?
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I thought between 10%~20% of a HDD should remain free for performance reasons?
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Yeah, at least.Originally Posted by mike20021969
Come on now, you know what you should do. Get important files off that drive (Newegg has, for instance, a 5 TB drive for $140). Then clone your OS drive to a new drive.
After that, your choice. Retire the drive or you could run chkdsk or format the drive. I've had good luck over the years with that, so long as there's no mechanical issue (grinding, etc). Though I never really trusted a drive after I've had S.M.A.R.T. warnings, some have served for years as scratch drives after a format.Pull! Bang! Darn! -
since my last post, i've been doing a little serching around for ideas, and i came across this device. i never knew such a thing existed. and now i know and can probably move forward in finally replacing my supposively failing old 160gb hdd with my new 320gb hdd that purchased 3 years ago.
so, before i go ahead and order this, does anyone have any comments and alternative suggestions ?
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DQJME7Y/?tag=hotoge-20 -
Yes, that kind of adapter is very-useful (as long as its chip doesn't corrupt the file tranfers, of course
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Together with a PCI-2-USB card, it gave a 4th internal HDD to my ancient XP desktop
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Some activity is normal, between the indexing service, system maintenance, antivirus scans... the HDD light can flash when the system is idle. Excessive activity that doesn't stop when you're using your PC could be due to malware. You can use the resource monitor (Vista & 7) to see which process is involved; keep in mind that starting the program will stop the activity so you have to wait for it to start over.Originally Posted by vhelp
The yellow marks won't clear themselves. Go to the Function menu and click Advanced Features, then Health Status Settings, increase the threshold value by one and click apply, repeat until the yellow mark goes away. Keep monitoring the drive to see if the caution comes back, if it does the drive is unreliable. I've seen brand new drives report a caution, once the threshold was adjusted they never had any warnings. Nobody knows exactly what those values mean, the manufacturers are keeping the info to themselves, worse they have different values between manufacturers and product line.Originally Posted by vhelp
That USB SATA bridge is fine to use to clone the 160GB drive to the 320; use the manufacturer's utility for that. WD and Seagate provides a stripped down version of Acronis. -
HDDs have a bunch of spare sectors. When a sector fails, then a spare one is used. If you run out of spare sectors, which sounds like your problem, the drive doesn't have long to live.
At least that's been my experience. If you fill a HDD over about 80%, there's not much room left for defragging and performance will decline.
I noticed a odd sound from one of my PCs a couple of days ago, not so much mechanical, but like five faint beeps and a pause, then repeated. I finally traced it to a hard drive and it was apparently a variation of the 'click of death' from the HDD. The drive is no longer accessible. Fortunately, it was a backup drive and easy to replace. I will try to recover it, though.
I've used a couple of the USB to SATA/PATA adapters and they work very well. They are generally a bit slow compared to SATA speeds, but if it does operate at USB 3.0 speeds, it could be fairly fast. Of course you would need a USB 3.0 port on your PC to take advantage of that.
It apparently does have a power supply, but I've also used one of the PCs SATA/PATA power connectors. -
And here was me feeling sorry for myself the other day because I bought four WD Black 1TB drives a few years ago, intending to upgrade the drives when I upgraded everything else in this PC. Only everything else wasn't upgraded so the drives sat on a shelf for a year or so before I my hard drive replacing enthusiasm reached an appropriate level..... the upshot of which is they're the 2010 model and a bit slower than the current one. In fact I read a review of the current WD 1TB Blue drives which benchmarked them as being a little faster than my Black drives......Originally Posted by vhelp
I only mention all that as when I read you were replacing the drive with a 320GB model purchased three years ago I found myself wondering how much slower it might be compared to a current model drive. Anyway....
Is the OS installed on the drive you're replacing? If it is, you're effectively replacing it with a USB hard drive..... and that sounds like a recipee for disaster. Will Windows even boot from/install on a USB drive? If the old drive's only being used for storage, then it won't matter, but I don't think you can clone Windows to the new drive and expect good things to happen.
Those adaptors tend to work fine, but if the drive has a master/slave jumper configuration, make sure it's set to "master". "Cable Select" might work, but jumping it as "master" would probably be better. I've forgotten a couple of times when connecting an IDE drive to a USB adaptor and couldn't understand the complete lack of success, until the penny dropped.
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