OT: Drive Diagnostics

reidc wrote on 8/16/2005, 9:56 AM

Hii all. I have several SCSI drives that I use for audio assets only. I suspect that one of my 73 GB Seagate drives- I don't know which one - is slowly failing. I'll do, say, 100 renders (audio only) and find one of them corrupt (pieces of random sound in places they shouldn't be, etc). This happened about a year ago, at which time I reformatted the drive. Now it's happening again. What tools are available for me to determine which, if any, of my drives is problematic? In the past I've posted this query to various & sundry audio groups, but I just get blank stares back.

Reid Caulfield

Comments

JJKizak wrote on 8/16/2005, 10:47 AM

From what you are saying the drive is slowly loosing segments and that's very bad. Why mess with it? Just replace it and get it over with.
Seagate probably has a utility to check it but technically it is garbage at this point in time. If you reformat it it will then loose another segment, then another, then another. I have switched to Fujitsu SCSI and they are like a rock.

JJK

johnmeyer wrote on 8/16/2005, 12:25 PM

Gibson's Spinrite was the original program for this sort of thing:

Spinrite

reidc wrote on 8/16/2005, 2:51 PM

I don't want to repair it. I want to replace it. But I first need to deternine which drive has the problem.

murk wrote on 8/16/2005, 3:24 PM

Do you know if your drives support S.M.A.R.T.? SMART can often provide a good indication of imminent drive failures.

Also, run chkdsk /r on each of the drives. This should locate any bad sectors and prevent the OS from placing data into those sectors.

John_Cline wrote on 8/16/2005, 3:56 PM

There are a lot of programs out there that will read and report the SMART data from a drive. One of them is a freeware program called "HD Tune" available at www.hdtune.com

John