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Test SATA HD?

A

Adrnshw6

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 19, 2005
Messages
172
Hello,
I have a Maxtor SATA HD and I want to test its integrity. On the Maxtor site you can download a tool to do this called Power Max, but it only works for ATA drives. There is no listing for an SATA drive. Anyone know any good SATA testers that will see if my drive is defective?
 
Any program that reads S.M.A.R.T. info should tell you about your drives. SpeedFan will give you that info IIRC. Might have to enable S.M.A.R.T. in bios though. How is your HDD setup? With newer bioses and their IDE "emulation" of SATA drives that Powermax program might find it without problem anyway.
 
kirbyrj said:
Any program that reads S.M.A.R.T. info should tell you about your drives. SpeedFan will give you that info IIRC. Might have to enable S.M.A.R.T. in bios though. How is your HDD setup? With newer bioses and their IDE "emulation" of SATA drives that Powermax program might find it without problem anyway.
Click to expand...

I just have a single SATA drive in the 1st SATA slot. I tried powermax but it stayed on the "looking for drive" screen forever.
 
Adrnshw6 said:
I just have a single SATA drive in the 1st SATA slot. I tried powermax but it stayed on the "looking for drive" screen forever.
Click to expand...

Maybe e-mail Maxtor tech support and see what they recommend. That's pretty bad on their end that they don't have ANYTHING that would work on SATA drives in the KT600, KT880, NF4 and whatever else they said doesn't work. I say that having 2 Maxtor SATA drives myself :(.

I have used the Western Digital utility on SATA drives and it works fine. That's why I suggested that earlier :).
 
I was able to use the Maxtor PowerMax utility with my SATA HD, but you have to have a controller that works (ie.. try it and find out).
I have noticed theat the utility works with the Intel ICH5 on my IC7Max3 if I set it to the normal/enhanced mode (ie.. sees each HD as a single) but wont work in RAID mode.
The utility also wont work on the 3114 controller.

I agree that they should update the utilities to work on a variety of SATA controllers since they require you to use the utility in order to get a RMA.

Good Luck

D.
 
Just wondering. What board do you have? If you have a 2nd SATA controller try that one?
 
Adrnshw6 said:
I have an Nforce4 board. An Asus A8N5X to be exact.
Click to expand...

That board doesn't have a 2nd SATA controller :(. I'd say call Maxtor up and see what they have to say since they make the drive.
 
kirbyrj said:
That board doesn't have a 2nd SATA controller :(. I'd say call Maxtor up and see what they have to say since they make the drive.
Click to expand...

Will do.

Oh, and another thing, I can run MaxBlast 4, and when I scan my drive it says that S.M.A.R.T. is disabled. If I disable it will I be able to run the diagnostic? How do I enable it?
 
Ok, I sent Maxtor this message
"Hello,
I recently bought a Diamond Max internal drive (6L200S0) for a custom computer I built and am having problems with the computer. I need to know if the HD is contributing to the problems. I downloaded powermax, and ran it. I got to the screen where it says it is looking for the drive and that is as far as I can go. It sits there until I reset my system. I then read the notes on the powermax download page, and it says that Powermax will not detect hard drives on a Nforce 4 motherboard, which I have. An Asus A8N5X to be exact. This really surprised me, since the Nforce 4 boards are becoming very popular now... The point is I need to run a HD diagnostic to see if my HD is causing a problem, but since Maxtor's program doesn't work, I don't know what to do.

Could you point me to a program that would work with my HD and motherboard?

Thanks"


And I got this reply:

"Thank you for sending your MAXTOR E-mail inquiry.

We do not have a program that would run diagnostics on this drive with this mother board chipset.

If you have any additional questions, please let me know.

Thank you,
Maxtor Technical Assistance
Moses
1-800 2MAXTOR (voice)
353 1 204 1111 (International)
http://www.maxtor.com (web)"


Wow. What lame customer support.

Are there ANY diagnostic tools that can be used for SATA and an Nforce 4 mobo?
 
That is hilarious. Personally, I find that to be right on par with the very definition of incompetence.
 
Well, anything with smart, if you install smartmonitortools or some similar package name ( I forget exactly what), you can do the internal health test using SMART - generally smartctl -H /dev/sd(whatever). Also you can get serial nums which are useful for finding and removing the right failed drive. (Using debian here, but any linux distro should have these tools available for dl)
 
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