My games drive may have started to die.

C

cyclone3d

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Aug 16, 2004
Messages
16,293
So... I had been playing Warframe and then exited and tried to load up JC3 a bit later and it crashed on me. Tried again and it red screened.

Rebooted and tried to open up steam and it said it couldn't be found.

Went to the drive and it wouldn't let me go into the steam folder because it said it was corrupted.

Ran a chkdsk /f and it found a bunch of files and fixed other stuff on the file system.

Reinstalled steam and it took like 5-6 times for it to update and let me launch it.

Ran the local files check on JC3 and it said that it needed to redownload 24 files. Tried it again and it just crashed again.

Ran chkdsk /f on it again and it found a bunch of the same types of errors it found the first time.

Now I am in the process of backing everything up to a different drive and am going to do a full fomat and see what it does.

SMART passes so not sure exactly what is wrong.
 
Platter drive or SSD?
Hopefully you get you needed stuff of the drive.

I use cobian backup for all my "save files" and what not from my gaming drive...aside from what backs up to the game "clouds"...
 
treefortrichard said:
Platter drive or SSD?
Hopefully you get you needed stuff of the drive.

I use cobian backup for all my "save files" and what not from my gaming drive...aside from what backs up to the game "clouds"...
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3tb WD Purple.

Only thing that would really happen if my gaming drive died would be that I would have to re-download all my games.

No cap on my connection. It would just take a while to download everything again.

I really need to get an external backup setup though. Most important stuff is being backed up to the cloud via another computer, but it would still suck to lose the not backed up stuff on my computer.

Edit.. actually, it would be much easier and economical for backup purposes to just add another drive or two to the computer that backs up to the cloud already and just sync my needed files with it.
 
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I don't know if the firmware on purple drives would bypass SMART but they make mediocre daily use drives. They are designed to work through bad sectors for continuous surveillance use.
 
3tb WD Purple.
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I would stay very far away from purple drives in a any PC. These are meant to be used in video surveillance appliances only where a few lost bits in the video stream will not be a big deal.
 
timecop said:
Sounds like RAM issues to me. Have you ran a memtest outside of OS yet?
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I haven't. The data finished backing up probably around 3-4a.m. and I started a full format before I left the house this morning.

From the specific problems it has been having, it is seems more like a drive problem to me but who knows at this point. If the format doesn't show anything up, I will try running games off of the drive I backed up to.

If it works that way I'll try a new SATA cable for the WD drive. If not, then I will suspect RAM.

drescherjm said:
I would stay very far away from purple drives in a any PC. These are meant to be in video surveillance appliances only where a few lost bits in the video stream will not be a big deal.
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Ive had this drive for probably around a year or so now and haven't had any issues with it before this. So HDDs meant for video surveillance are on purpose made to be unreliable? somehow I kind of doubt that.

It has a 3 year warranty so if it does turn out to be bad, I'll just get it replaced.
 
cyclone3d said:
I haven't. The data finished backing up probably around 3-4a.m. and I started a full format before I left the house this morning.

From the specific problems it has been having, it is seems more like a drive problem to me but who knows at this point. If the format doesn't show anything up, I will try running games off of the drive I backed up to.

If it works that way I'll try a new SATA cable for the WD drive. If not, then I will suspect RAM.



Ive had this drive for probably around a year or so now and haven't had any issues with it before this. So HDDs meant for video surveillance are on purpose made to be unreliable? somehow I kind of doubt that.

It has a 3 year warranty so if it does turn out to be bad, I'll just get it replaced.
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no he is claiming they are made to keep functioning with lost data....programs cant do that. Video has a higher tolerance to missing data then programs.
 
SomeGuy133 said:
no he is claiming they are made to keep functioning with lost data....programs cant do that. Video has a higher tolerance to missing data then programs.
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But if the drive is any good, it will not be losing data, especially when it is being used mostly to just read static data.

Drive that loses data == faulty drive.
 
Furious_Styles said:
Try running some HDD benchmarks and see if there are any obvious anomalies.
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Finished up the full format a little bit ago It took from around 8a.m. to about 3p.m. to do a full format in Windows. I really hate doing full formats on large drives.

It didn't find any bad sectors.

Then I ran a test with CrystalDiskMark. Looks normal to me.

WD_3_TB_Purple.png
 
cyclone3d said:
But if the drive is any good, it will not be losing data, especially when it is being used mostly to just read static data.

Drive that loses data == faulty drive.
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no the point was that the SMART and drives are made to keep working as it slowly ages and dies and not just crap out instantly. Videos have much better bad sector tolerance than programs so these drives according to what he is saying are designed to keep inching along vs other drives that would just crap out.

thats what he is claiming from what i gathered. in surveillance you want to keep writing data as long as possible and a sudden failure is bad. These are supposedly design to keep inching along even near death, which is a no go for regular hardrives.
 
cyclone3d said:
I haven't. The data finished backing up probably around 3-4a.m. and I started a full format before I left the house this morning.
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Then do, windows has built in boot-time ram checker:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff700221.aspx (windows 7)
http://support.rm.com/TechnicalArticle.asp?cref=TEC3222505 (windows 8)

Or google for whatever version of windows or use memtest86 boot cd.

I've got a WD purple used for storing random garbage I don't mind losing, and while I did have an issue with it once (it was a loose sata cable), it hasn't had any problems since. All this "corrupted data" etc stuff you're reporting if it was really coming from the drive itself would have been logged by SMART. And contrary to the claims here that WD purples would be "OK" to lose data while reporting NO errors while doing so, thats quite a ridiculous claim that better be backed up by official documentation from WD. (hint: it won't be, as it's not true).

Your issue could also be a loose/crappy cable as well - try swapping that if memtest finds nothing and SMART still reports no drive errors.
 
timecop said:
Then do, windows has built in boot-time ram checker:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff700221.aspx (windows 7)
http://support.rm.com/TechnicalArticle.asp?cref=TEC3222505 (windows 8)

Or google for whatever version of windows or use memtest86 boot cd.

I've got a WD purple used for storing random garbage I don't mind losing, and while I did have an issue with it once (it was a loose sata cable), it hasn't had any problems since. All this "corrupted data" etc stuff you're reporting if it was really coming from the drive itself would have been logged by SMART. And contrary to the claims here that WD purples would be "OK" to lose data while reporting NO errors while doing so, thats quite a ridiculous claim that better be backed up by official documentation from WD. (hint: it won't be, as it's not true).

Your issue could also be a loose/crappy cable as well - try swapping that if memtest finds nothing and SMART still reports no drive errors.
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So JC3 loads up fine on the drive I backed everything up to... Not going to chance playing it though as I have started backing up a co-workers 9 years old 320GB WD drive that is reading at about 50KB-3MB/s. I am really surprised that this drive even came up but I decided to try it one more time before sending it off to get the board replaced on it.

It was originally an external drive and something messed up in the external enclosure and the drive would not even spin up anymore in the enclosure.

It has been running since lunch today and has backed up about 5GB so far... uggghhhh.

I'll mess with my WD purple once I get this other drive fully backed up... going to take a whole lot of days at this rate.
 
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