If there is one thing I am totally oblivious to, it is a HDD going south.  I have a WD Velociraptor 300g hard drive and have been using it heavily for about a year now.  I have installed and re-installed multiple OS's as well as formatting and defragging.  I have done a Windows disk check to see the health of the drive, but am not satisfied.  I have noticed that in Windows 7 the performance rated it at a 5.9 and sometimes I get a disk read error when installing an OS (doesn't matter which).  I want to know if there is a way that I can tell withot a doubt that the hard drive is going downhill, or that it is perfectly fine.  Any help is appreciated.  Thanks.

the 5.9 score in correct with w7, yea I would run wd software to do a full check of the hdd.

Would constantly re-formatting and installing OS's cause any sort of long term damage other that normal wear and tear?

richj44

tommygun11

Would constantly re-formatting and installing OS's cause any sort of long term damage other that normal wear and tear?

No.

Yeah that only applies to SSD drives from what I  understand since they have limited cycles.

Definitely run the WD tools to check the disk.  Also check the windows event logs.  I want to say it was the System event log (otherwise it's the application one) that I had a bunch of errors about 9 months after I bought my WD that were from the nvidia disk driver.  I can't remember the service name but it was obviously related to the nvidia disk controller and I was having the hanging/slow computer during heavy disk access.  Turned out to be a failing HD for sure and I got it RMA'd.  I think I had to agree to a temporary charge or just give them a credit card # in case but I ended up getting cross shipping even where they send the new one out then I send the old one back afterwords.

I recently went through a hard drive going bad - the 300GB Seagate listed in my sig is no longer a part of my rig.

Six to 9 months ago my rig started having problems - lockups, BSoDs randomly with different codes, Event Viewer showing a whole ton of read/write errors, and Windows sometimes wouldnt load (it would sit at the bootscreen).
I backed down my overclocks, tried different RAM, and eventually the problem stopped.  I suspected the hard drive but the problem went away before I hit that troubleshooting step, so I though I had it nailed.  It also didnt help that SeaTools said the disk was fine, indeed, all the disk diagnostic tools I used said it was fine.

Fast forward to just a few weeks ago, pretty much mid-December, and the same started happening again.  This time, I went directly for the hard drive and replaced it with a WD Black 1TB in early January.  Havent had a problem since.  I've even clocked back up.

I would say, When in doubt, replace.

~Fus