Western Digital 80GB SE click on hot day and now a slow drive

[Darren]

I have a heat problem with my AMD 2200+. Power supply 400w with 120mm case
fan and a couple of other 60mm ones + Volcano 7.

This case heat problem has probably cooked my 7200 RPM WD 80GB SE drive.

This summer and the last in Australia, I've slowed the CPU by 1/3 in the
BIOS to cool the PC down. I run MBM5.

I have an air-conditioner in the room for really hot days, on a separate
circuit. My PC runs on a 20amp 4000w circuit now.

I did have the air-con on the same circuit as the PC for 3 days, only on
very low about 2 months ago.

The problem began yesterday when burning a DVD. I let the room get a bit
hot and I heard a click. The HDD light would stay on for about a full
second, then go off with another click. My DVD burn failed. The drive
clicked 20 times or more over the next few hours and I ran the Win 2k
Scandisk. All seemed okay.

I downloaded the WD latest diag and full test surface scan is okay.

But the drive is slow!! I use 3 OS's, normally Win2k. I rebooted to 98 as
I have the old 'Nuts and Bolts' diag program. N & B told me my HDD had a
4.1mb transfer. It used to be 10 times that or so.

I'm downloading HD Tach freeware and perhaps SIGuardian, though I know the
drive is way too slow as it took 1 hour 50 to burn an 80 minute DVD at 4x.
Now even at 4x that is way, way too slow. Other simple file copying and
boot ups tell me the HDD is way too slow.

Sounds like a new drive to me. What do you think?

Oh UDMA settings - Primary DMA if available on Device 0 - Current
Transfer mode PIO
- Secondary both devices to UDMA

S.M.A.R.T. mode is off in the BIOS

I would like not to buy a drive but will be looking at:
about 160gb WD
with a Vantec Vortex HDD cooler or better if you know one, for about the
same price
an Aerocool HT-102 CPU cooler or better, as the Volcano just doesn't cut it
I'm afraid - perhaps bad thermal paste/paste job
and I need a slim, powerful video card cooler for the Radeon 8500 which runs
at almost 50 celcius on hot days.

What's the prognosis doc?

Thanks in advance

Darren

 

[Darren]

I installed HD Tach 3.0.1.0

Win XP partition transfer was 39.9mb.
Win2K partition transfer (seq. read) was 2mb!!!

UDMA settings differ significantly in XP
- Primary DMA is UDMA5 in XP and PIO in 2k
- Secondary is UDMA2 in XP and UDMA in 2k

How can I change this?

What's gone wrong?

Is there a service causing problems?

I'm going to bed.

Help!

 

[Darren]

Is there a via patch available for my ASUS AV7333 mobo to force UDMA in
Win2k
Last update was VIA 4-in-1 4.37

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Is there a via patch available for my ASUS AV7333 mobo to force UDMA in Win2k
Last update was VIA 4-in-1 4.37

Check SMART. If your drive is OK now, you may have had interface CRC errors.
Win2k probably down graded to PIO mode because of that.
Remove the drive from device manager or what ever they
call it now in Win2k and re-detect. See what that gets you.

 

[Daniel Prince]

Check SMART. If your drive is OK now, you may have had interface CRC errors.
Win2k probably down graded to PIO mode because of that.
Remove the drive from device manager or what ever they
call it now in Win2k and re-detect. See what that gets you.

If Win2k downgrades the drive again it is probably because of a
poor, damaged, excessively long cable or just a bad connection.
Sometimes it helps to unplug a cable and plug it back in again.

 

[Darren]

I've reinstalled Windows from an image.

Win2K is now UDMA but lots of SMART errors in SiGuardian. Says drive only
has a few weeks before failing.

I've bought a new drive and I think this one's going back to WD

Are these SMART programs worthwhile? Never used one before.

Thanks for the tips. I upgrade Via drivers too.

Darren

 

[Impmon]

Are these SMART programs worthwhile? Never used one before.

IMO not that useful. It helps if your drive is failing *and* the
SMART monitoring system works properly. It's no help if the hard
drive suffers catastrophic failure or a touchy SMART monitoring.