PCA Forums

I had a HDD fail in a RAID 0 server. When I took it out and placed it in another computer it formatted fine and is working a-okay. Is there a disk utility that will test the HDD to see if it will fail again?

download the manufacturer's diagnostic utility (all brands have them on their specific sites) and give that a shot. also check the SMART data on the drive. oh, and spinrite too.

The Drive is WD and I tried their utility but it will not work with Vista...go figure or I have the wrong version. How do I read the SMART data?

I will try spinrite

NM... I have the WD Smart utility. This drive does not have smart. (Go figure) but the utility does have a drive test that will take about 2 hours on a 500gig drive. I will report back and thanks.

All modern drives have SMART. However some SATA controllers and all USB enclosures do not support SMART. If at all possible you want to test the drive with SMART enabled. You also never really want to run any diagnostic on a drive via a USB interface because it will usually be very slow (in addition to not having access to SMART).

There is a Windows and a DOS based factory diagnostic. The DOS one is more reliable but it ties up the computer for a while. It makes a boot disc.

If you have a copy of Spinrite I would also HIGHLY recommend running Spinrite level 4 on that drive before I'd ever trust it on a mission critical RAID array. Level 4 forces the drive's error correction system to examine every individual sector and swap out any weak ones. Again, you want to do this with SMART enabled on a direct connection to the mobo's controller otherwise it can't do the job efficiently. Without SMART you also risk overheating the drive. Spinrite will make a drive get pretty warm and if SMART is available, Spinrite will pause the test if the drive overheats.

Oh and never run Spinrite or any drive diagnostic on a RAID array. It won't do anything. The RAID controller hides the drive electronics from any diagnostic. Pull the individual drives out of the array and connect them directly to a mobo's controller and test each drive individually.

Ironically I have a 75gig raptor, 500gig WD, and 320gig USB drive connected to my computer and the only one that shows up with SMART is the USB drive. I am currently running the diagnostics from WD and so far nothing wrong. I will try Spinrite later.

I believe the drive got hot and failed ... it was in a condition where the drive was too hot to touch in the Raid 0 NAS. Maybe the drive is good just failed under the heat.