Compumaniac12

I got a hard drive here, its a Western Digital Caviar SE EIDE. Its malfunctioning to the point that it will boot up and work like 20% of the time.
Its a year and 5 months old... so WD wants nothing to do with it.
Is it possible to fix?, maybe some deep formatting to get it goin again? or is there a way i can disable the bad sections so that i can use part of it.

Done_Fishin

have you tried downloading wd's diagnosis utility and running it ?

you can also try checkdisk /r from the command prompt or right clicking on the drive selecting tools , error recovery, tick both boxes in the "pop up" and letting windows check it out.
If its the boot drive you may have to shutdown and restrat to allow access to checking at strt of windows. Let it go ahead with thecheck when you get the blue screen

crazijoe

Is it an OEM drive? Most WD drives have a 3yr warranty.

Done_Fishin

I forgot about that bt .. don't go via your retail outlet they'll b*llsh*t you with warraty etc. but get in direct contact with WD. Sometimes if they're in a good mood, you send them a 100GB drive and they return a bigger one if they have can't fix your own & have no stock of an exact replacement.

Compumaniac12

yea i already checked on their site, put the serial number in, told me the warranty is gone and done with.

crazijoe

Must be an OEM drive.

Compumaniac12

well ill stick it back in tonight and run some diagnostics on it. It shouldntve broken that quickly, i mayve not been an angel carrying it around but the thing is armored by 2mm of metal...

Done_Fishin

so you think that the armor plating will protect do you?

the internals of a disk drive are equivalent to an egg, put an egg in a metal box and throw it around!
laptop drives are different but they're built differently expecting to be caried carefully with the occasional hard knock. Desktop drives are built to be put inside units that don't move and migh get the very occasional knowck
when not powered the head tends to be put in park position but can move across the disk surface when knocked. Whenthe drive is in use the head sits above a high speed spinning surface which creates an air cushion under the head and prevents the two surfaces from making contact. similar in principle to the wings of an aircraft.
when the drive is not spinning the aisr cushion is gone and there is no protection at all which means that you will be leaving marks across your drive.

I'd suggest, now that the truth has come out, that you try HDD regenerator which might be able to recover a little bit of your drive.

http://www.tomdownload.com/utilities...egenerator.htm

Stop carrying it around unless you have some means to absorb shocks before the shock hits the drive.

linderman

as consumers we are the ones to blame we wanted big and cheap drives

what ??????? now we want big, cheap and high quality DONT THINK it works that way!

Compumaniac12

i agree with the cheap part, ill give it a shot, thanks.

linderman

BTW: always buy the retail version of hard drives, I have an online friend that works in a HD plant (cant say which one or he will be torqued!)

he tells me if drives are produced out of spec, they are OEM

the retail drives on the other hand are tested prior to boxing

just food for thought now if you have a good back-up procedure then you dont care >>>>> there are some great prices on OEM like ebay but buyer beware

Done_Fishin

Having worked for many years in production I know that "Electronic goods are always tested before being boxed"

however who is going to sell "cheap" to someone else what is sold more expensively as a brand name. No-one. So the differnce in price is that the OEM product will have a more relaxed test ..

It's like the manufacture of resistors, there are different accuracies. the most expensive is 0.5% and they are the first creamed off of the line. then they check for 1%, 2%, 5%, 10% and 20%. These days they can guarantee that most "recipes" give 10% or better so whatver is left after 10% is a free for all.
Manufacturing equipment is similar. Whatever can be tested and fits the tight manufacturers specs will be stocked for their own use. Whatever falls outside the tight specs and isn't actaually faulty, will be stocked for OEM sales.Whatever is left and can't be fixed within set time period is sold off as scrap to whoever has the time and patience to try and fix it up. Might even be used for spares in 3rd world countries.

Compumaniac12

well i formatted the thing 2x, and tried some other programs, it seems to be working well as a slave right now, but i expect it to fail within afew months as it has in the past.
my house is so cold it should be at a comfortable temp untill the spring and ill deal with the problems then.
Thanks for your help, hopefully i dont come back to this thread anytime soon.

dmitryk

Retail drives and OEM drives are not that different in the testing process at least at Seagate & Maxtor. I don't think that is much different with other manufacture.

In a sense in it a little bit opposite to what you say. The simple reason behind that OEM kind of plays a role of consumer advocate. Since they has a power of volume to control drive manufacture. If they see common failure on the drives they will force drive manufacture to fix that problem or find a solution.
Consumer on other end doesn't have that option. Drive with the problems even when they sent back to drive manufacture is not scrutinized same way to find the failure problem.

Warranty was always considered as a measure of quality. To some degree it is, but mostly it is marketing and sales gimmick. Seagate is the only one who offers 5 year warranty. That target directly consumers - you and me. When drive offered to OEM they only case about cost.... that the reason warranty cut, since warranty cost $ ..... the drives are still the same.

As of quality of the drives. They are selected and they have washing out effect. When drive is manufactured (same for WDC or Seagate) during self test (burn in process) quality of heads, media is analyzed. Then based on that parameters decided if drive is capable to serve full capacity -500GB or need to be reduced in capacity to provide same life time. Manufacture will turn off heads by effectively disabling problematic heads or "slice" media into zone and turn off problematic zones off.

No difference for Retail or OEM. In addition you can't judge if drive is lesser capacity it worse then full capacity. Since quality of other surfaces or zones are undefined.... They all bigger then threshold of qualifying them for their life time ... but on how much you will not find out...

linderman

In any manufacturing process there are different grades of goods.
'

The best is not sold for less in the majority of cases. how do they cull off the seconds ?




Isnt a 300gig drive that has had sections of the disk disabled an then marketed and sold as a 200 gig drive a "cull"

compared to one that was assembled with the intent to be 200gig and has little if any troublesome surface area, and therefore sold as a 200gig drive

dmitryk

To pass manufacture specs, which measure drive performance and expected lifetime, all drives which has go throug tests. No matter how drive is cut/sliced to reduce capacity , either because of the not fitting into the window of thresholds or because of pure marketing (to have variety of capacity), it still have to pass. So any drive you buy reduced or full capacity will perform to spec.
What you can easily see here that in a lot of cases cost of production of modern drive is same if they use same number of components (disk platters, heads).
In addition a some of drives which has been intended to be assembled at specific capacity is marketing choice. So they do cut them of in many ways not just because of degrading components.

linderman

your information makes perfect sense. I do however question the current markets quality control standards, otherwise why such a notable amount of drives that dont function right out of the box ??


I can remember years ago, a bum hard drive was as infrequent as a bum CPU

now, I dont even hesitate one second to suspect a bad drive.

It just seems to me all the drive market cares about is big & cheap IMO we have sold out reliability.

dmitryk

big & cheap... in addition complexity of the drive is likely over 100 fold .... and prices still dropping. That is why manufactures offten develop "value" drive where they use cheapest components possible. e.g. WD has Prtotege , Maxtor had DMP8, etc.

Fujisu just simply quit producing desktop drives, Maxtor went bankrupt, IBM sold it HDD business to HGST... Samung decided not to lead techology developmentand stay behind all the time.....
Oh well.... Comodity market with comodity prices. Consumer Electronics will make it even worse....

crazijoe

Maxtor actually did not go bankrupt. A simple buyout by Seagate. I do not know much about the QC of drives however with OEM and retail CPUs the quality are usually the same. With Intel, all CPU are processed the same and go through the same QA. Then manufacturer (Intel) does not and will not warranty any OEM CPU. This is generally done by the OEM or retailer that sells the CPU. Since the OEM or retailer buys the CPUs in such a bulk quanity, and it does not come with a warranty. This is generally where the pricing difference comes into play. Normally the retailler will offer a 30 day warranty. If a CPU comes back under this warranty, this ussually is a loss to the retailer. However most retailers will take into consideration that a certian percentage of the lot will be defective and structure their pricing acordingly.
System builders of "Mass Produced" machines also benifit from this because they are the one warranting a CPU. If a large lot from a batch become defective, then the OEM builder will notify the manuufacture.

This statement would be hard to swallow because of the amount of drives a manufacturer puts out. I cannot see a manufacturer decided to "reduce the capacity", "disabling problematic heads" or "turn off problematic zones off" of singled out drives as this is not a cost effective way of mass production. Normally drives that do not meet specs would be discarded and/or refurbished. Taking the time to change the drives specs because of a faultering part inside of it would be time consuming and not cost effective to a manufacturer.

dmitryk

You are right, the way manufacture of chips and storage relates to OEM and Retail channels are the same.
Maxtor didn't went bankrupt , that was over statement , I should of put quotation marks around it. But in sense of their financial statements and cost of productions, manufacture yield, as well as multiple changes in the upper management ... they almost did. Segate was able to pick them up before it happened.

As of you doubt on the way drives manufactured.... well they are not manufactured the same way as chips are. Assembly line is not the final stage of the manufacturing process nor it is the first.
Before assembly line some manufactures will write servo to platters on standalone servo writers. At that point each surface of the platter is analyzed for the quality. If it is not possible to use one of the sides it still used in the "reduced capacity" drives.
After drive is assembled it goes through burn in test and in case of some of the manufactures servo pattern is written at this stage as well.
The complex calculation is performed at this stage by drive itself where all of the "adaptive" tables are created. At the same time drive either reduced in capacity or kept at the same level like it was designed for.
It might be hard to believe but that is the way drive manufactures do it know.
Drives are much more complex then they were before