Damn HDD!

[turkster]

Ok Ive been having trouble with a 4 month old WD Caviar 8mb cache 80GB drive in my system.
I was using this as my boot and storage disk untill a few days ago when i got two more of the same drives and set them up in a RAID 0 array which is working nicely . The drive in question had a boot and storage partition and a few weeks ago I did multiple attempts (formats etc) at installing XP on the boot partition which were not succesful because of dud RAM (which of course i did not find out untill many hours tearing my hair out )

Now i still had stuff on the storage (logical) partition which i tried to copy across to my RAID array yesterday. Well aparently some of the files were corrupt and could not be copied and others copied correctly and could not be opened. Anyway got everything necessary off of it and deleted all partitions and attempted to reformat with Partition Magic which seemed to go fine except when i next booted XP ran Chkdisk and found errors on that drive that it couldnt fix.
I reformatted it and that seemd to fix it (Chkdisc finds no errors).

I am a bit worried as this is supposedly meant to be my backup for important stuff on the RAID array and i dont want it to do this again. Do any of you guys know what may have caused this. The drive is relatively new and hasnt been dropped etc . The multiple formats in an attempt to install XP with dud RAM may have been a problem possibly

Also are there any benchmarks for testing drive integrity apart from chkdisk?

[Blub2k]

Have a look here man.
http://support.wdc.com/download/#diagutils

[turkster]

Thanks will try these when i get home.

Don't worry I was planning on checking the WD site out at some time .

[turkster]

Well tried the WD diagnostic and no problems either in the quick test or the full media test BUT using the new HD Tach beta I get an average read speed of 4.5MB/s an burst speed of 4.9MBs a second and a CPU usage of 96% . Sisoft sandra gave similar results.

What on earth is happening? .

[turkster]

Ok ive worked out that this drive works fine when designated slave. Well at least it gets good score in HD tach and Sandra. I installed fedora linux on it and it works away fine no problems.

I put a FAT32 partition after all the Linux partitions on the drive. This seems to work fine but every so often when i am using it from Win XP (Booted from RAID array) it disappears. This usually happens when copying files. XP says something like 'file canoot be copied Windows cannot find source drive'.
Yet when i reboot the drive is recognised again and the files are intact except for the ones that failed to copy. There is never any problems booting linux immediatly after this happens and i have not had any problems copyig files in linux.

This is very confusing. I have tried all maer of things to try and fix it but it is driving me mad .

Anyone any ideas? Before i hurl the damn thing out the window