Failing Hard Drive Anomoly

Hey Guys,

I bought a 2TB Saumsung hard drive in March for a new build. It was fine up until about 2 weeks ago when it started making an audible clicking sound and it began to run really slowly (unable to run games off of it, 10x to unrar a file, etc)

I didn't want to lose all my data so I bought a new drive and cloned it with Acronis. Changed the drive letter and bingo. All is well.

Problem is I did a full format on the old drive and now it is working fine and I can hear no audible sound. I know that bad sectors can be "fixed" by a full format but the audible sound? Surely not.

Now I don't know what to do. I want to RMA it because I don't trust storing data on it but will the supplier send me a replacement for a temporarily working drive?

Can I prove that it has had problems? I assume that no bad sectors will show up in tests as the format has hidden them and if I use it until the sound returns I risk losing what I store on it.

Any advice welcome.

Have you run some srot of drive testing/fitness tool on it ? If not it is worth doing that and when asked by whoever you bought it from you can say I ran this test and got this result - get a print out on it if you can or screen grab and send that to them witha date on it as to when you ran that test - there'd be no argument then.

I ran Seatools on it and it said it was fine. This was before the format. It clearly wasn't though. Performance and noise were poor. I'm running HDDScan now but I worry that it will also say it is fine with any bad sectors being hidden.

Saying the drive is fine is sort of the point of Seatools. If you want to return a drive you have to run their diagnostic utility. If the utility can map out the bad sectors and keep the drive running for the duration of the warranty period, then Seagate are happy.

You need to exercise the drive a bit and see if it happens again. Running a full surface scan over and over can force the issue and make the drive run out of spare sectors to swap for bad ones. At that point, you can get an RMA code to return the drive. If it survives, then the drive aught to be good enough to use.

Chances are the drive had a dodgy sector or two that weren't picked up at manufacture and Seatools has now mapped them out for good ones, and you now have a drive that only has good sectors visible.

If you don't trust Seatools then the boot & nuke CD for securely erasing drives will write to every sector on the drive several times which would be a good workout.