It seems that yet another 500GB hard drive failed on me, which prompted me to install Windows 7 on a new drive.
It seems like this same thing happened a few months ago. I have several 500GB drives, and it seems like Windows was going slow, and then files get “read errors”. I have to do an “offline” disk scan (since it is the boot drive) and it always gets stuck on a particular sector. Since the drive is “dirty” it wants to run a scan every time so I cannot boot into Windows and have to connect the drive to another PC.
If I put that drive into a USB enclosure and run a scan then the drive appears perfectly fine.
Well it happened again. I’m really not sure what the problem is. All of these drives are Seagate Barracuda 500GB and all were previously installed in a QNAP 1U NAS. The problem could be any of these issues:
- A batch of bad drives
- The NAS did something to them
- SATA controller on motherboard failing
- Bad SATA cable
- Windows drivers?
I really can’t believe that ALL of the drives are bad, because they are less than a year old and in my experience Seagate drives are very reliable.
The QNAP NAS runs Linux and makes a billion partitions on the drives, and they were configured in RAID 5. I really can’t believe that the NAS could modify the drives at such a low level as to muss them up.
I’ve tried to eliminate as much as I can by changing sata cables and using seperate SATA controllers on the motherboard. I simply cannot figure out why I’m having this problem and it’s hard to diagnose because the problem cannot be immediately replicated… it happens over time.
So yet again I’m salvaging what I can from the drive and putting it on the new drive… which now has Windows 7.
