Seagate 7200.11 640GB - Strange Behaviour?

[MaxPayne]

I pieced together my recently purchased E8400 P5Q-E system the other day, loaded up the OS, some apps, games, etc. All went smoothly.

Today I booted up, logged into Windows, and then at some point everything locked up and my hard drive began making loud (louder than usual) clicking noises. I rebooted into safe mode and ran chkdsk, the drive making loud noises all the while, and got hung up on the file verification step. Rebooted again, got back into Windows and killed some apps which seemed to be doing a lot of disk reads/writes. I downloaded Seagates SeaTools utility and the drive seemed to pass all the short tests (S.M.A.R.T., SDT, short generic). Now the drive seems to have quieted down (no more clicking) and is behaving... I tried HD Tune just to get an idea of whether its performance characteristics matched those in the "WD SE16 640GB vs. Seagate 7200.11 640GB -- A somewhat complete analysis" thread, and got the following result:

This seems noticeably noisier and slower than the ones in that thread. The drive is set up in SATA IDE mode. Could I have something set up wrong? Thanks!

 

[CMetaphor]

Sata IDE mode is basically the sata ports emulating the function of IDE at the bios level. Meaning that to your OS, you don't even have a sata controller. You can switch it to standard SATA mode (AHCI) but you'll have to reinstall windows I think. :shok: Sorry I don't have better news...

Edit: Sorry, I forgot to address your other issue. Louder-than-normal seeking noises coming from a Seagate is a problem they've had since the 7200.7 series (someone can correct me on this if I'm wrong). Seagate may replace the drive as defective, but in most cases I've seen, the drive will still perform normally and pass all SeaTools diagnostics.

 

[paphman910]

The SATA IDE Mode for at least seems to stall and had a busy hourglass when I boot into the login screen. After login the hourglass shows up again for another 8 seconds. It seems that the response is a little slow in IDE Mode. When I click on Internet explorer it shows the hourglass for another 6 seconds. It happened on both my P5K and P5K-E so I used AHCI mode and all the problems are gone. I only have on hard drive and it is a Seagate 7200.11 500GB drive. It seems that the emulation mode of IDE is slower than in AHCI as it might be using the hardware.

Paphman910

 

[MaxPayne]

Haha oh well.. guess it's Windows installation round 3 (32bit->64bit->64bit + AHCI). I also take it that it's not a great idea to switch it to AHCI on the BIOS, since I seem to BSOD every time I boot now, even after switching it back. :doh:

Thanks for the info guys!

 

[CMetaphor]

Whoa.... Whoa there. Hold your horses. Switch the SATA mode to AHCI in Bios causes crashes? You mean you BSOD when loading windows, not when posting. (BSOD in windows after changing to AHCI = Normal - hence, the reinstall of windows).

 

[miggs78]

Yup that is pretty normal, you'd have to re-install windows unfortunately..

 

[MaxPayne]

Correct, when loading Windows, not posting.

Guess, I learned my lesson, although I'm really confused why changing the interface makes all the data unavailable. Doesn't the filesystem remain the same?

 

[DarKStar]

There are sneaky way sto go back and forth AHCI / IDE without re-isntalling windows, but it is a bit tricky and things can easily go wrong if you don't do it right - I have always run in SATA IDE mode and things run smooth and fast - If you don't have a need for hot swapping or NCQ, run in IDE - I'm running in IDE mode and I get excellent HDTune and HDTach results with sustained reads over 75MB/s, bursts in the 175-180MB/s.

As far as the loud clicking definately not normal! Yes the seagates will sometimes make a "chink..clink" type of sound from time to time, but any loud KLONK-KLONK-KLONK sound is NOT a sound you ever want to hear !

 

[MaxPayne]

Yeah, I was reading about the tricks to get into AHCI sans reinstallation, unfortunately after my stupid fiddling with the BIOS. Truth be told, it was working pretty snappy in IDE mode until the hang up. Anyways, a reinstallation later and it's AHCI from here on!

The little incident this morning got me spooked. Any suggestions on how to thoroughly test the drive to make sure I'm not working with a ticking time bomb?
I guess I could run SeaTools in its entirety, I'm just dreading another complete reinstall.

EDIT: I realize now this probably should have gone in the troubleshooting section...

 

[enaberif]

Hate to say it but you don't have to re-install windows there is a way around that can work but isn't always guaranteed.

But also know that AHCI doesn't really give any "extra" benefits for a desktop.

Source:
How to switch from IDE to AHCI without reinstalling (IP35-pro) - Universal abit USA Forums

I've seen many posts here asking the same question over and over again and i see a lot of misinformation and suggestions and mostly the comment "it does not work".

Well, it does work and it's actually really easy.

1. Since you have Windows XP already installed i expect you also have internet access.

2. Download the Intel matrix storage drivers from intel.
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Prod...ProductID=1809

3. Open a dos prompt and navigate to the place where you downloaded the driver.

4. type the name of the file followed by -A -A -PC:\<path> (e.g. IATA50_ENU.EXE -A -A -PC:\C:)

5. this extracts the drivers needed on the C:\ drive in 2 folders (for 64 bit and for 32 bit OS'ses).

6. Open up your device manager and navigate to IDE/ATAPI controllers.

7. Find the 2 intel SATA controllers in there and right click one of them and select "update driver". Select to chose a driver and select "have diskette".

8. when asked to specify the location of the driver, browse to the folder you created in step 4 and select the AHCI driver from the list (on the bottom somewhere). It will tell you that the driver is not the right driver for your device but you will simply ignore this warning.

9. Do the same for the other intel SATA controller in your device manager.

10. shutdown the PC, go into the BIOS, change from IDE mode to AHCI and reboot.

11. System should come up and everything is peachy.