Faulty hard drives

[Jobos]

I’ve been given a server to look at. The reports are that it runs slow and has random crashes.

 

I’ve had a good look round it and on the whole it’s not that bad and the only thing I can find wrong is the HDs. It has two 200MB SATA HD’s and when copying over a large file from the network one HD will copy the file over ok but when copying to the other HD the whole system slows right down, so much in fact that even task manager won’t update the performance graph. I’ve not been able to crash the system but I can imagine this sort of slowdown is not helping. I’ve used Aidi and HD Tach to test the HD’s and they both report that one of the HD’s has large dropouts. The other HD has dropouts but not as bad. The OS is installed on the worst drive so that could be the cause of the crashes.

 

I’ve attached HD Tach’s report. Do you agree that the HD needs replacing?

[plexer]

Have you swapped the cables around and retested just to prove it is the drive and not the controller?

 

Ben

[Jobos]

Yes and its worse if anything.

[Midget]

Get a copy of MHDD. boot into it and test the HDD, if it shows slow/bad sectors bin it. It's not worth the hassle of risking it

[Ric_]

Of course you checked for the obvious disk fragmentation didn't you? This would cause slow read/writes.

 

For checking for bad sectors I personally use UBCD - lots of tests on there