What's the best way to test a potentially faulty drive?

[discodave]

Hi

I've recently installed a pair of Samsung 1TB drives (HD103SJ) as data drives in a new system. Initially I set them up in RAID 0 but the Intel monitoring software flagged that there was a problem with one of them, didn't give much info though. I took them out of raid and set up as 2 separate drives. One is working fine but the other failed again while copying some files onto it. The OS lost it but it came back after a couple of reboots.

I've tried the Samsung Hutil utility but it doesn't work with this drive, maybe because it's new.

I need to find out if the drive is faulty or if it's something else.

What would be the best, preferably free software to test it with and the best way to do about it?

Many thanks

Other system info:

Gigabyte X58A-UD3R Mother Board, i7 920 Overclocked at 4Hhz, 6Gb RAM (Bundle already set up by pros not me!)
SSD system drive
450w PSU

All of the drive (the SSD and both the HDDs) are connected to the Intel ICH10R SATA controller in AHCI mode. On ports 0, 2 and 3.

 

[juggy199]

Maybe you can try running chkdsk d: /f /r (whichever the drive letter is for your bad drive) in a CMD prompt.

 

[discodave]

Thanks juggy I will run chkdsk and see if that flags anything up.

I downloaded the HD Tune trial last night. I ran the surface scan and it picked up a few bad blocks. I'm not sure if these have come from when I initial set up of the drive in a RAID 0 maybe. I only did a quick format which I probably shouldn't have done.

Shoud I be getting any bad blocks on a new drive though?. Could they just be software related bad blocks whick could be sorted by Zero formatting the drive?

Would using HD tune to reformat the drive and maybe Zero the entire drive be a good idea?

Or maybe someone has some other suggestions?

Many thanks

 

[djbrad007]

Hi discodave,

in your bios, set your sata mode to "ide compatibility" or "standard" instead of raid or ahci.

Then the samsung utility should see the drive.

A new hd should not have bad blocks, it's not the initial raid setup or quick format.

Brad

 

[discodave]

Hi djbrad

Thanks for the message.

Good to know it's nothing I've done that has caused it.

I've already tried it in another PC and got the utility running but it then said this model is not supported unfortunately. It's not listed on the Samsung website. I think because it's one of the latest models maybe they haven't updated the utility yet.

Thanks