Weird hard-drive problem

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mic_y

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Hi guys,

I am having an issue with my HTPC. I have 2 HDD's in my HTPC (Seagate 7200.12 500GB and WD Caviar GP 2TB). The PC was working perfectly and then all of a sudden yesterday the 2TB started giving trouble. What would happen is as follows:

Under normal conditions (reading) I could access the 2TB with no issues, but as soon as I attempt to write anything large (Exceeding 1GB) to the drive it would start fine, and then at some random point would just get stuck, and eventually the system would stop seeing the drive completely (the drive letter would be lost and the device would not detect in the BIOS until I completely shut the machine down and then turned it on again - A simple reboot would not sort the issue out). This would happen without fail (I repeated the test at least 5 times). I initially thought that the drive was failing, and decided to back it up (easier said than done on a drive with only 300GB free).

While I was doing this I decided to check whether it was not the SATA port or SATA controller on the motherboard failing, and tried swapping SATA ports (have 6 on the board and only 3 devices so no shortage of free ports). Lo and behold the problem disappeared. I wrote 4 files exceeding 10GB to the drive without a problem. Just to confirm that I had indeed identified the issue, I shut the machine down, and plugged the drive back in to the port it was originally plugged in to. Tried the same operation again, and still got the same result (no errors copying around 50GB of data).

Could the initial problem have been caused by something as simple as a bad connection between the HDD and the board? This is the only explanation I have. I have tried running HDD testing tools (WD Tools boot CD) and these came up with no errors.

Please tell me if you guys have any idea what the problem could be.
 
mic_y said:
Could the initial problem have been caused by something as simple as a bad connection between the HDD and the board? This is the only explanation I have. I have tried running HDD testing tools (WD Tools boot CD) and these came up with no errors.
Click to expand...

Sounds that way
 
Archer said:
Sounds that way
Click to expand...

well it would make sense except for the fact that it only happened while writing large files to the drive (all other circumstances the drive worked perfectly for multiple hours on end). Also nobody has opened that box in at least a year, and the problem has never occurred before, so it would be strange for a SATA connector to suddenly dislodge itself just enough. This is why I am looking for some other possible explanations.
 
Had the same problem with my hdd. Was on a raid array and Disk records were deleted. Before you start your pc again, swop all sata data and power cables. It is not necessary that the cable that is on your 2tb is the cable that is faulty. My system has 3 250G hdd's on a raid 1 array and a single 1TB hdd, and one on the raid array was the culprit. My 1 tb was erased from the MBR and I had to use recovery tools to get my data back. Extremely painful but you should be fine if you swop out the cables before starting up again.
 
mic_y said:
so it would be strange for a SATA connector to suddenly dislodge itself just enough. This is why I am looking for some other possible explanations.
Click to expand...

Not completely unheard of and I've personally had it with old PATA drives. With a slightly loose connection, oxidation between the contact points can cause shoddy connectivity, something reseating a cable can fix. As for it only failing on larger files, possibly to do with drive cache or the calculation of checksums for the copying data. I'm hardly an expert on that sort of thing though and only know the principles on a relatively high level.
 
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