I bought 2TB Caviar Green. Put into SATA 5 on Dell XPS 720 running 64-bit Vista Ultimate. Used Windows Computer Management to try and format. Hangs at 54% (no error message). Used DataLifeguard, it cannot do “Write Zeros” because it also hangs (shows time remaining as more than 100,000 hours). Run Extended test and it says 08 - Too Many Bad Sectors. (First drive I was trying to do MBR, all others I have used GID.)
2nd Drive (new RMA from WDC) - Same
3rd Drive (new RMA from WDC) - Same
4th Drive - WDC agreed this was weird, so they sent me a Caviar Black as the RMA drive. Unable to quick format (not surprising). Tried for format from Computer Management, hang at 54%. Tried to do “write zeros” from DataLifeguard, unable to complete (hangs). Quick Test fails at 1,999,103. Extended Test gets 08 - Too many bad sectors.
Tried something different. Made the first Terabyte into a partition, it formatted without problem. Tried for format the second partition, it hung pretty early in the process (about where 54% of the drive would be.)
WHAT CAN POSSIBLY EXPLAIN 4 BRAND NEW CAVIARS (3 Green, 1 Black) all claiming to have too many bad sectors starting at 54% of the drive? It sounds to me like a computer problem, not a drive problem. But it is really weird that it powers up, formats the first 1TB, etc.
Appreciate the suggestion, but that isn’t it. One of the Green is from August, the other 2 are from 2 different dates in Novmeber, and the Black is presumably a different production line.
If that fails, then you can confirm that it’s not a drive issue by formatting the drives in an external USB enclosure. This will rule out the SATA drivers and SATA ports.
Another thing to try is to temporarily configure the SATA controller for legacy or IDE compatibility mode in the BIOS setup. This will force Windows to use standard IDE drivers. If the drives format to completion, then it will be a SATA driver issue.
It was the SATA drivers. FOR FUTURE SEARCHERS: I am very good (too good?) about driver updates. I went to the Nvidia site at least once a week and used the “tool” for telling me if drivers needed update. That updated my graphics driver just fine. But it always claimed that the motherboard drivers were up to date. But it was wrong. I was back on 10.3.0.21, and when I used the manual tool to locate the drivers for the Nforce 680i LT SLI, I found that they were all the way up to 11.something. Download the new drivers and the drive formatted perfectly, an Extended Test ran to normal completion. (While it was the fault of the SATA drivers, it seems like the LifeGuard software should have a way of detecting (based on exactly which block is bad??) that it is the SATA drivers and not a failure on the hard drive itself?
I have a experienced a related / similar problem. I am running WinXP on a Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop with a SIIG eSATA Express Card. I have a Thermaltake BlacXDuet Model ST0014U hard drive dual dock. I have a Hitachi Deskstar (HDS722020ALA330) – 2 TB – in one slot and a Caviar Black (WD2001FASS) – 2 TB – in the other slot. The CavBlack was an RMA replacement of a previous unit that exhibited the same failure to format to completion (54%) as discussed above. I also had a second CavBlack fail formatting at around 93%. These were using USB connections to external enclosures (CP Tech CP-E305) and tried this on two different WinXP computers (SP3 both). And, as above, reducing the partition size did yield a full format on that partition but no further.
I’v used the CavBlack replacement for several weeks for secondary backups of my Shadow Protect image files. This week during clean-up 4 SP image files (4GB each) would not delete: Corrupted file or directory entry error. I ran the WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics extended test and that came back successful and I finally ran CHKDSK / F which fixed the directory entry problem. I was then able to delete the unwanted SP image files. But now the CavBlack SMART section still shows “FAILED” and its SMART information is unretrievable (“Could not read SMART information”). The drive appears to work but I am uncertain as to its true current (and long-term) health.
The SIIG card has been trouble free for two years (now with the Hitachi) and previously with my five Seagate Barracuda’s (yes, all of them are the notorious ST31500N1A1AS model but they have been completely trouble-free for me. ) I diversified to WD for that very reputational reason. If it ain’t broke… or just maybe my bad luck.
Everything appears to be up to date on my Dell so I am not sure how to proceed. The Thermaltake site said not to install their drivers unless the drive does not show in Disk Management so I passed on doing that as everything formatted fine (32KB allocation unti). I will probably try a USB enclosure with the CavBlack to see if that helps isolate the problem.
I heartily agree that DLD should do a better job of detecting a potential driver incompatibility. On the other hand this app is a godsend compared to the super primitive one for the Hitachi’s (stand-alone DOS boot?) For that reason alone I hope the Hitachi’s never have a problem!
ive had 6 out of 8 WD1002FAEX (1tb, sata 6gb, 64mb) bad
one was S.M.A.R.T. “too many errors” out of the box (tested via DLGDiag on 2 different machines with sata 3.0gb & sata 6.0gb) DLGDiag started the short test and errored out with S.M.A.R.T. failure and refused to test any further
one just started clicking after 2-3 hours of use, the system would hang or not even boot-up
