My hard drive is now eligible for disability
 

This is kind of an odd problem. I imagine there's no solution except buying a new hard drive, but I figured I'd ask anyway before forking over the $200 and spending a weekend copying files.
Two weeks ago, I'm ripping a DVD to my hard drive, a 200gb Western Digital 8mb cache. It's my second hard drive, and I use it exclusively for storage of mp3s and temporary space while backing up my DVDs. During the session, I start to play an mp3, the way I know I had done many times while working with DVDs, and the mp3 playback is horribly muddled, so I turn it off. The DVD takes well over an hour to copy, and won't burn properly.
Ever since that night my read/write speeds from the drive are pathetic, capped at about 1 meg/sec, often much slower. Mp3s skip really badly, to the point where I have to have Winamp buffer the entire file to memory (which thankfully is easy to do, Winamp is awesome).
My theory was that I just wore the drive out, using it as temporary space for DVD ripping, which can involve writing and then deleting about 20 gigs of space per session.
While, like I said, I've pretty much written this drive off as useless, I'm wondering if anyone thinks my hypothesis about why it broke is correct. I don't want to ruin another drive like this...

if its dropping bits (highly likely, but probability-wise, it almost never happens), then kiss your data goodbye.

do a scandisk on it, if it reports bad sectors, buy a new disk, save what you can.

Disks usually have a estimated life of at least 100,000 hours of activity (most outlast this by a good margin, but thats the warranty).

Good Luck.

Well Scandisk picks up nothing, that was the first thing I did. And it's about a year old, it's on 60-70% of the time, but still, that isn't close to 100,000 hours. I've even always had it in a heatsink/fan, it's a relatively cool 90 degrees right now. *sigh*

My roomate ha a 160gig western digital die in about a 1/2 years period of time....just cause they are supposed to last 100,000 doesn't necessarily mean that they will

yeah, but it should last more than half a year. I wouldn't say you just used it to much, I'd say it's a defective drive instead.

I have two 160 GBs, a 120 GB, an 80 GB, and a 20 GB, and most of those have been RAPED when it comes to copying files back and forth, and they all work still. The 20 and 80 are YEARS old, and I've copied to and fro hundreds of times.

Have you made sure that the drive is still running in DMA mode? Windows will sometimes set a drive at PIO mode when it gets too many errors or determines the drive can't operate at that speed.

In my experience, Windows is often wrong.

Fragmentation and a very full drive can cause massive problems as well. Get about 15% of the drive free and do a complete defrag and see if it helps

yakimushi: I can't believe it, that solved everything, apparantly! Once you mentioned DMA I knew that was problem... I just haven't worked with computers much lately, a lot has really slipped to the back reaches of my mind.
So in your honor, I am donating some bling to the TFP. You saved me $200, quite possibly.
Woohoo! I can listen to music again!

Glad to hear it!

sorry to butt in on this thread, but what does DMA and PIO mean?

whew that's quite a lot of info, it makes me realize just how little I know about the hardware, but I guess we all gotta learn sometime