tcp

I have a Western Digital Velociraptor 300 GB 10,000RPM.

The SMART Status says its only 61 days old but it's health is 10 percent.

I never noticed a problem until I overclocked my RAM and it broke the Windows boot process on the first boot.

I figured it couldn't have done much damage, but then I remembered I did the Shutdown Windows and perform updates the night before.

So I ended up with a bad registry, so I launched my recovery disk and tried a system restore. No luck. So I started file recovery but it was coming up with bad sectors. That's when I figured out how badly the disk was damaged.

I have been running HDD regenerator for the past two days but like every 8th sector is bad. It says 264 hours left. I ordered two 640GB 7200RPM drives from newegg for $70 each, so that I can do RAID striping for more speed.

I don't really know if I should trust the WD Raptors even though I had one for over a year before I gave it to a relative. Do you know if they are unreliable?

Willravel

I had a WD Scorpio go bad a while back.

Send it to WD, and they'll send you a brand new one.

Martian

I've never bothered with the Raptor series. I've seen a lot of these drives burn out in remarkably short time frames; I've been told that they're more reliable now than they used to be, but I honestly don't see the performance gain as being worth the cost/risk.

If you have anything important on that drive, back it up. Now. Don't put it off, or you might lose it.

If it's only 61 days old, RMA should be a simple process.

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Lasereth

You should be able to get a replacement easily. But SMART errors are correct 95% of the time according to Google storage farms so you need to get the data off fast.

I have a 74 GB Raptor that I've had for 3 years with absolutely no problems. I've honestly never heard that they were unreliable.

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Vigilante

I run one and have for ...8 months? something like that. I've found a couple of bitmap errors, but I don't sweat that too much. I run the velociraptor for windows and a 36GB raptor that I've had forever for ubuntu.

Did you happen to have the drive in an unlocked-clock SATA port? That may have been the issue. You may have effectively overclocked the drive along with the system bus when you were playing with RAM. Unlikely with most enthusiast boards now, but possible.

Either way, SMART errors on an unclocked drive mean RMA. Those would generally not have been caused by a simple overclock of the RAM and/or system bus. Send it back, get a new one. You're well within the warranty period.

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bendsley

I have two WD 300gb velociraptor drives in RAID 0. So, each is used equally. I had one go bad not too long ago, send it to WD and they shipped me a replacement without hassle. I went ahead and did the advanced replacement where I gave them my credit card info first so they would ship me the hard drive without needing mine back first. Once I received theirs and installed it, I sent the faulty one back and all was well.

They are great drives and very fast, especially in RAID 0.

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tcp

I have an ASUS Crosshair III, I used CPU Level Up which is the like a preconfigured overclock and supposed to change CPU and RAM frequency. Could that overclocked my SATA drive? How will I know so I don't have problems with RMA?

Vigilante

You won't have problems. Just RMA it. It was weak and would have failed anyways, or died completely coincidentally. My bet is on the latter.

Forget the overclock in this case, but don't use that method again. Any OEM OC util or method is always bad. Flashing the BIOS in windows, even when given a utility by the OEM, is bad and sometimes kills the motherboard. When an OEM gives you drivers, it's usually best to use newer ones from the chipset manufacturer.

Basically, anything the OEM tells you to use, you ignore and research for a better option. There are a few exceptions to that, but not many. This REALLY goes for ASUS. Never use anything ASUS. They deviate from reference designs and use their own crappy utils, trying to distance themselves from other board manufs. Just like their annoying deviations, the utils are just as irritating.

If you want to know how to overclock the real way, then go to overclockers.com forums Overclockers Forums and research your motherboard. I guarantee someone else there has it and has overclocked it. Additionally the chipset will be a common component in other boards, so there will be discussion there as well. Many threads will also cover chipset voltages + CPU voltage + other tweaks as a combined effort.

In other words, always overclock by BIOS. Test it every time you make the slightest change, and remember your settings. Once you have a good stable speed you like and is 100% stable, leave it that way and enjoy your super fast rig

I ran my Q6600 @ 3.6GHz daily speed for a year. I clocked it back to stock because I don't use it often enough or hard enough to warrant the wattage increase.

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tcp

Thanks for the advice. Yea I'll do more research. It was just a single setting in the BIOS so I didn't think it would do any harm since I didn't touch the "Extreme" section.