WD6400AAKS dying?

[RPGWiZaRD]

I'd say so...

http://img79.imageshack.us/img79/8749/62366193.jpg (http://img79.imageshack.us/i/62366193.jpg/)

Bootup is slower than usual, and it often has some idle "clicking operation noise" similiar to a bad Seagate driver I got some time ago. Used to be like 86~88MB/s avg read.... now it varies between 52 ~ 70MB/s lol.

Maybe time to give Samsung F3 1TB a try, always wanted to give Samsung a try sometimes.

[lowfat]

Try running the WD Diagnostics on the drive?

[RPGWiZaRD]

Yea I will but I already tested unplugging the data cable while keeping the power connector to the drive and the noise was still there.... so yea that's a STRONG hint the drive is about to die rather soon.

EDIT: The "Quick test" passed in WD Datalifeguard diagnostics, running an extended test to see if any bad sectors are found now. In rare cases bad sectors can cause slower performance too.

It's a shame the Samsung F3 1TB aren't in stock at any finnish etailer atm.

EDIT2: Meh no bad sectors found either, the operating parts are just worn out. I had a 320GB WD that also starting doing slight extra noise altho it was more like high pitched whine after like 1 year and now this also happens after just like 1 year to my WD6400AAKS. I've read about more ppl having similiar experience so if a WD HDD is failing the most common issue seems to be the layers for the platters or sth that are getting easily worn out after like 1 - 2 years.

I can't help but laugh when looking at all my maxtors I've owned (7 in total), no problems whatsoever and ppl have had the most issues with these. They've been tortured in high temps (~53C), whitstood a lot of vibration when running some of them in a rather unique way in the past when running out of comp case 3.5" spots so put two of them to stand on top of CD-Rom drive and in the bottom of the comp case ontop of the screws u put between motherboard and the side of the case to get some airflow going beneath them. YET none has failed or showed signs of aging operational parts, even the oldest 160GB that was bought in 2002 runs perfectly in my parents comp yet today and in my current comp the oldest one is something like 4.5~5 years I think and doesn't even have a bad sector and I run my comp almost 24/7! :p: It's a shame Maxtor is owned by Failgate these days. ^^

[RPGWiZaRD]

Hmm, now when the HDD is almost empty, only got stuff on the 30GB os partition and the other partition is empty I get this result:

http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/7673/wd6400aaks.jpg (http://img156.imageshack.us/i/wd6400aaks.jpg/)

:confused: Only moved stuff over from this drive to the new Samsung F3 500GB drive and currently using another SATA cable/slot. Before it had this clicking noise on idle as well which caused 1 sec random freezings when I booted the OS from that drive but also when I disconnected sata cable and just fired up BIOS while power connector was plugged in it had this noise so it wasn't the sata cable that was faulty but it doesn't do this noise anymore... seems like the worn out mechanical parts just decided to recover themselves or what? I would prolly have a hard time getting it RMAd in its current state as it appears to be healthy again? lol

EDIT: Formatted HDD into one big partition:

http://img126.imageshack.us/img126/7512/wd6400aaksformat.jpg (http://img126.imageshack.us/i/wd6400aaksformat.jpg/)

So what gives?