Problems with Seagate hd's. Cable test: Write sector error.

V

veldi

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 9, 2008
Messages
184
Hello.

My hd' setup consists of

2x500Gb Raid0 Seagate ST3500320AS
1x1Tb Seagate ST31000340AS
1x500Gb Western Digital WD5000AAKS


Now everything worked nicely until one point when my OS started to "stutter", as in, the mouse cursor froze for a few seconds and I was unable to do anything, and releasing itself for a second and then froze again. I've scanned the drives with Spinrite level 1 scan and it didn't find any problems. Now I've downloaded Seatools and ran generic tests, of which all of them passed, though, I was unable to scan the raid array at all.

Then I though maybe I should try WD Data Lifeguard and proceeded to do so. It shows OK for SMART status for all drives though when I try to run a diag on any Seagat edrive it shows this.

4dus4.png


Now, my OS is on the raid array and boots up and works just fine despite that error. The other 500Gb Seagate stutters when I try to read or write data to it, preventing me from using the OS up until I somehow manage to break the operation or unplug the drive. The other 1Tb Seagate drive allows me to read or write without problem.

I'm confused now. I took both 500Gb and 1Tb Seagate drives and put them into my other computer and ran the same test using WD software and it returned no errors.

Could my mobo be possibly damaged somehow? I'll confess I did some hot-plugging with my drives.

Maybe the BIOS is slightly corrupted.

Any thoughts?

EDIT: The mobo is Asus Maxmus Formula.
 
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Have you investigated a PIO issue? It could be surface errors on one of your HDDs, it could also be that windows resorted to PIO for some reason and that causes very slow operation and even mouse stuttering/sound stuttering, etc.

A PIO issue can be determined by running a simple HDTune benchmark, watch for the throughput (if its higher than 16MB/s its not a PIO issue) and watch for the CPU utilization. It would show 100% utilization for single core, 50% for dual core, 25% for quad core, or close to these numbers.
 
sub.mesa said:
Have you investigated a PIO issue? It could be surface errors on one of your HDDs, it could also be that windows resorted to PIO for some reason and that causes very slow operation and even mouse stuttering/sound stuttering, etc.

A PIO issue can be determined by running a simple HDTune benchmark, watch for the throughput (if its higher than 16MB/s its not a PIO issue) and watch for the CPU utilization. It would show 100% utilization for single core, 50% for dual core, 25% for quad core, or close to these numbers.
Click to expand...

Installed new BIOS from Asus and no change.

Tried HDtune and the transfer speeds are ok, around 100MB/s. Also the cpu utilization is very low, up to 5% on a quad 6600.

There is one strange thing though. Eventho the drives are connected thru sata, they're being deteced as IDE in WD tool.

2la4ysm.png


I took the drive out of the system and put it in my other working computer and the drive is also detected as IDE.

For the record, SATA is set up in BIOS as RAID mode.

Also as you can see, RAID0 array is almost 1TB and it's also being reported badly.
 
Its the program itself, try an earlier version, someone in the WD forums spotted this.
 
Sorry for bumping but noone has anny ideas? I'd like to recover those drives.
 
Well, what's the older version? I can see only Windlg_117.rar on WD's site.

Here's a report from version 1.09

2nsb5n6.png
 
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OldMX said:
Download version 1.13 from here
Click to expand...

Ok, cable test on Seagate 500GB goes thru and it manages to finish the test without problems.

While testing the raid array though ...

332o46x.png


This is what happens.

Could it be because of drivers or the Matrix Storage driver?
 
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