Hey all

A few weeks ago my 250GB Western Digital drive went down, and it wend down badly. After much messing around and numerous failed installs, I finally put it in a friend's PC, Partition Magic'd it then it ran fine, no problems at all.

Then a few days ago I was playing Half Life 2 and suddenly the sound started looping and I hard-rebooted. Performance was really awful, so I defragged C: and then left it. Next time I booted up, it Blue-Screened at startup. So I formatted C: and reinstalled XP. I ran WD's Win DataLifeGuard Tools (which is much more useful than the Windows DataLifeGuard - gives you SMART display etc). This gave a value for 'Raw Read Error Rate' at 1 - very, very bad. I continued using the machine for a few days, and am trying to figure out what to do. These are the figures EVEREST gives me now:


[ WDC WD2500JB-55EVA0 (WD-WMAEH2666838) ]

01 Raw Read Error Rate 51 192 1 54 OK: Value is normal
03 Spin Up Time 21 124 121 4333 OK: Value is normal
04 Start/Stop Count 40 100 100 328 OK: Value is normal
05 Reallocated Sector Count 140 195 195 78 OK: Value is normal
07 Seek Error Rate 51 200 200 0 OK: Value is normal
09 Power-On Time Count 0 97 97 2516 OK: Always passing
0A Spin Retry Count 51 100 100 0 OK: Value is normal
0B Calibration Retry Count51 100 100 0 OK: Value is normal
0C Power Cycle Count 0 100 100 256 OK: Always passing
C2 Temperature 0 113 253 37 OK: Always passing
C4 Reallocation Event Count0 193 193 7 OK: Always passing
C5 Current Pending Sector Count0 175 175 1029 OK: Always passing
C6 Off-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count0 200 200 5 OK: Always passing
C7 Ultra ATA CRC Error Rate 0 200 253 0 OK: Always passing
C8 Write Error Rate 51 166 155 1138 OK: Value is normal


What I'm asking is, if I RMA it (its still under warranty) will they give me a new drive or a refurbed one?
Secondly, is it worth keeping whatever they give me, or should I just eBay it?

Any advice or suggestions would be most welcome!
thanks in advance!
-J