Aelfgeft
04-04-2007, 10:05 AM
Here is my current hard drive setup.
1 - 320GB 7200 Maxtor IDE drive
/10GB - Windows Partition (c)
/288GB - Storage Partition (d)
1 - 160GB 7200 Maxtor SATA drive
/160GB - Storage Partition (e)
The IDE drive I got about 4 or 5 months ago. Yes, I'm using IDE because otherwise I'd need a floppy to load Windows. So I've been using this setup for some time, putting my games on the SATA drive and putting all my music, movies, pics, etc on the 288GB partition, which has been working flawlessly until yesterday.
At some point while I was working, my IDE drive suddenly just slowed to a crawl. Literally, at 6:00PM, I was watching DIVX rips straight off the drive smooth as silk. My girlfriend comes home, I talk to her for a couple hours, come back, and the DIVX rip is stuttering. I try some other movies, stuttering as well. I copy over a 350MB rip to my SATA drive (which takes about 5 minutes!) and it plays silky smooth off my SATA. I also notice that all of a sudden, the pain in the ass hard drive flicker returns. This is when I either pull up an IE window or Explorer window and I get the "one-flicker-a-second" where the system stalls (except for the audio) for a moment every second and the hard drive light comes on at each of those moments.
I can hear no clicking. I also noticed that while I could copy 60 gigs over to my SATA drive in 2 hours, copying 10 gigs of pictures (a lot more individual files) took just as long.
Is this drive dying? I know I can RMA it, but I'm wondering if this sounds like a bad sector problem that I could get rid of with a LL format.
1 - 320GB 7200 Maxtor IDE drive
/10GB - Windows Partition (c)
/288GB - Storage Partition (d)
1 - 160GB 7200 Maxtor SATA drive
/160GB - Storage Partition (e)
The IDE drive I got about 4 or 5 months ago. Yes, I'm using IDE because otherwise I'd need a floppy to load Windows. So I've been using this setup for some time, putting my games on the SATA drive and putting all my music, movies, pics, etc on the 288GB partition, which has been working flawlessly until yesterday.
At some point while I was working, my IDE drive suddenly just slowed to a crawl. Literally, at 6:00PM, I was watching DIVX rips straight off the drive smooth as silk. My girlfriend comes home, I talk to her for a couple hours, come back, and the DIVX rip is stuttering. I try some other movies, stuttering as well. I copy over a 350MB rip to my SATA drive (which takes about 5 minutes!) and it plays silky smooth off my SATA. I also notice that all of a sudden, the pain in the ass hard drive flicker returns. This is when I either pull up an IE window or Explorer window and I get the "one-flicker-a-second" where the system stalls (except for the audio) for a moment every second and the hard drive light comes on at each of those moments.
I can hear no clicking. I also noticed that while I could copy 60 gigs over to my SATA drive in 2 hours, copying 10 gigs of pictures (a lot more individual files) took just as long.
Is this drive dying? I know I can RMA it, but I'm wondering if this sounds like a bad sector problem that I could get rid of with a LL format.