Need help finding what drive starting to fail.

S

southpaw

n00b
Joined
Jun 8, 2004
Messages
34
Need help finding what drive starting to fail.
24/7 workstation 3 SATA and 4 IDE.
I have a drive that around every 2 weeks slaps the head and the computer locks up.
I reboot and the computer is fine and works for another few weeks.
I pulled the 4 IDE last time it happened. So the system only has the 3 SATA drives..
Tonight the system did same thing slapped the head and locked up.
I have been checking the SMART on the drives with HDTune and temp and error logs are clean.

The 3 SATA drives need to be in the system for daily operation. Would be quite difficult to run only one drive at a time.

I need some ideas on finding which one of the drives is getting the head slap.
 
What makes you think it's a "head slap"? Have you lost data from these problems, or is locking up the only symptom?
 
I can hear the head hit the side of the drive just once. This is what a repeated head slap sounds like.

Audio:
http://www.hitachigst.com/hddt/knowtree.nsf/cffe836ed7c12018862565b000530c74/4b1a62a50f405d0d86256756006e340c/$FILE/head_damage_1.wav

Video:
http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/clicking-hard-disk-fault.MOV

I was hoping for a disk monitoring tool that would log the error before the system locked.

I still can't believe that HDD manufactures haven't included a mic in the drive that would catch the early errors before the drive failed. We all know s.m.a.r.t doesn't work 90% of the time.
 
Well head slapped and system locked up again today. So the problem is accelerating.
Any help would be appreciated.
 
Yes S.M.A.R.T log and drive temps are fine. But as we all know SMART only catches 13% of problems.
 
Which OS? If you're using Windows, you should find physical I/O errors in the system log.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top