naza911

The Failing Drive was not the Windows Drive, I only ever used it as a 'Data' Storage Drive. HD Drive Pro is running on the other Hard drive. Hope that helps.

Let me rephrase the whole post 10. I had just got the drive and fitted in the new replacement that was given to me. The dead drive had been given back the the retailer. After Installing the drive, and starting the PC, I did a benchmark on the drive. I then looked at the SMART Info of the drive, at this point 15 minutes had passed. I had not formatted the drive or anything. All the testing was done by me at home.

The HDD was from a Retailer, I could have sent it back to Seagate and waited for them to send the replacement, but I thought I might as well go to the store and see what they say. They tested it and gave me a brand new replacement. The Benchmark is for the new drive that they gave me.

Just fitted in the replacement drive and I am a little worried by what is it tell me, particularly the Seek Error rate. http://i38.tinypic.com/2ro5ixj.jpg This is basically within the first 15mins of installation, and after running the benchmark test on HD Tune. There was nothing on it, just been installed not even initialized by Windows

Just to update the drive has now failed. Although it does not look mechanical more electrical. Started up the PC today and the first thing I get is a puff of smoke, and the dead drive.

It completed without any errors.

All I am worried about is if I send it back, they will say there is no fault as this problem does not occur all the time. In terms of SMART, it would suggests that the hard drive is perfectly fine.

I got a problem in trying to work out for sure if my hard drive is failing. Problems began a few weeks ago when the 160GB Maxtor Drive began to make a sort of grinding noise. Just to help you out a bit, its the sound that happens after the three clicks in the sound clip. http://www.thenetworkadministrator.com/Head_damage%202.wav There was not as such clicking, but just a loud sound. I know in normal operation drives do make this sound, but this was much louder. Anyway, I did a defrag of the had drive and it went away. Today it came back, I straight away got all my data of the drive. During which it made the sound not all the time but at some files, sounded rather random. I left the data on the drive and did a disk check in DOS. At the stage 2(Verifying Indexes) it made the sound at around 30% and 80%, everytime( I repeated the check a good few times). So then I wipe and formatted the disk again. Ran the Seatools Program and did all the tests, it passed all of them. So now I put some data on the drive and do the the same check on the disk. I can hear the sound but I would say that would be normal operation. HDD Life reports 55% Health, with all SMART Tools reporting everything is fine. Pasting the SMART info was messy, so I upped a SS. http://i35.tinypic.com/ve96s9.png The HDD was brought in February so still in warranty made by Seagate although branded Maxtor. I now cannot get it to make the sounds as it did before, I have done benchmarks and read/writes test's practically for the last 4 hours, but all seems fine. So was the sort of sound I am reporting just due to messed up file system, which was messing with the head? I did do many full chkdsk's with the data, before the wipe, I want to be fairly sure there is a problem before sending the drive away and wasting money, if they claim there is no fault. Thanks for your help.