Cav's Place

It’s certainly not better than the first one at least. It passed the first test I put it through, but failed the second. Further tests initially marked 48 bad clusters, then only confirmed six of them, though it struggled through all that 48-cluster area. What’s more, it started making worrying noises after those clusters were found, after initially being very quiet. It now clicks a little every few seconds…
Either way, I installed everything over the weekend and just closed the case and put everything that was left lying around back in the box I use for such things a little while ago, so I plan to see how long it’ll last. I don’t think I could have had it replaced yet again just over this anyway, since it’s not failing in any other way yet and I believe there’s a clause that says HDDs that have bad sectors covering less than 0.1% of their surface are not considered defective. Knowing that there are still problems and that another failure is just a matter of time doesn’t do anything to improve my mood though, especially since there also was an odd moment while copying some things back and my DVD drive didn’t actually recover either.

The DVD drive’s problem are DVD-ROMs, which appears to be the most frequent problem Plextor drives have, because it can read CDs and blank or burned DVDs just fine. I didn’t try to use it to write anything now, but I don’t particularly care about that. Anyway, this means that if I wouldn’t have had legally purchased software I wouldn’t even have noticed the issue, but as it is it did cause a significant amount of frustration right now, when I had to reinstall things, because I need to try a lot of times before it’ll work once and “trying” usually means rebooting with the disk in the drive, because it never worked otherwise. Once it manages to read a disk it’ll keep working for as long as that disk’s in the drive and I don’t reboot again, but that’s the only guarantee. Sometimes it kept working even after I switched disks and once it worked through two consecutive reboots, but trying that seems to be quite a risk… But since it’s no longer under warranty and don’t use it enough to justify replacing it just now, I’ll have to deal with it as it is for as long as I can.

Otherwise, after finishing Two Worlds while wating for the first HDD to be replaced, I decided to get back to Neverwinter Nights as soon as I was back to “normal”. That proves to be quite difficult, as the problems Neverwinter Nights has with Windows Vista are very obvious this time around, refusing to start the vast majority of the time. Still, I just saw that, after changing some settings, it’ll run without any problems if I can just get it to start, which just means trying to run it and ending the process forcefully when it hangs until it’ll eventually start. It didn’t do this the first time around, so I don’t know what’s wrong with it now, but it does seem to be what usually happens when you try to run it on Vista, so I guess I was just lucky the first time around…

I’ll leave you with some translated comments posted about this particular HDD model on the sites of two shops from here, just to emphasize that I really made a really bad choice back when I decided to buy it.

“Meanwhile the HDD went sort of crazy… Read errors, files missing and so on.”

“It functions abnormally! Makes strange noises, typical for a hard disk failure, sometimes it’s detected by the SATA controller and sometimes it’s not and even Windows Vista stops showing it as being in the system: Partitions were vanishing and the HDD itself was vanishing from Device Manager. I’m very unhappy with this product!”

“The first one had its transfer speed (to another SATA drive) drop to at most three megabits per second after two months. I was thankful that I managed to save my 300 GB in three days and it was replaced – it also gave partitioning and formatting errors. The second one has writing and reading errors, also after two months.”

“I bought two almost a year ago, one of which I gave to a friend as a gift. They both failed two days apart: They lost the formatting (becoming RAW) and only about 128 GB out of the 500 are still visible. It started with some random boot errors for which I blamed the operating system, though their inconsistency should have made me realize it was a hardware problem. If you have such a HDD, backup now. Statistically, chances are that it’ll fail after less than a year.”

“I haven’t seen another product with so many complaints. Very praised, expensive, you could easily buy a 1 TB drive instead, and from Seagate too. I wasn’t expecting this. I thought it was an accident when the first one failed two days after I bought it, but now I have to look for the warranty a second time.”

“I bought one nearly three months ago and a week ago it went to hell… It’s no longer detected for more than about two minutes, after which the motherboard can’t find it at all. Booting off it is out of the question. A friend of mine got the 750 GB model (also Barracuda ES.2 32 MB buffer, identical) and the same thing happened to him as well, just that in his case it went to hell even sooner. Conclusion: I’d say you should try another model, though not necessarily another manufacturer… I have two other Seagates that I’ve been using for five years and they’re completely problem-free.”

“It died after a year and a half. The motor that spins the disks got stuck… It buzzed and the system no longer saw it, not even in BIOS. I lost everything I had on it.”

“I couldn’t even use it for seven months! The disks are spinning but the motherboard can’t detect it, plus that I hear a buzz every ten seconds…”

“It burned after nine months, taking my data with it.“