hard drive dead??

my brother has recently been having probelms with his maxtor 250GB hard drive going really slow. I used HD tach on it and the speed was only at 3.3Mb's. I cleared everything off of it and formatted and then having got the same speed switched the IDE cable and voila was getting speeds of 32Mb/s again.

So all seemed to be in order until i started to transfer a file to the hard drive. It started out fine but the the time remaing just kept increasing and it had reverted back to the old speed. Did the test again and was still getting the speed of 32Mb/s.

Have since formatted using powermax and still the same thing. have also ran maxtor checks on it to see if there were any errors on the disk and nothing.

can anyway shed any light on this....is the hard drive just dead?

thanks in advacne for any help.

cheers

 

so after you swapped out the cable, everything was fine again right? if so, then you fixed your problem .

so long as you don't hear the "clicking of death", then the HDD is fine

 

The drive that you were transferring FROM was on the old IDE cable, right?

Sounds like you have a bad IDE cable there.

 

I wouldn't call it dead.....Maxtor drivers are pretty reliable, sounds like the cable was dead.

All of my Maxtors are alive to this date, including the 250 MB 4,200 RPM top shelf SCSI drive I bought way back when :lol:

 

after i switched the cable i was getting the 32MBs speed but when i transferred any file from any drive (including from my iriver) it is going at the same slow speed as before which doesn't make any sense.

I too have never had a maxtor drive die on me either until now...maybe?

 

I don't think its dead if the diagnostic says its ok.

Its probably a case of the transfer mode or somesuch.

Or a driver issue.

Try installing your chipset drivers again

 

have you tried testing the disk drive in another system?
test it on another system, set it as master and as one device per channel/IDE cable. also besure to use the IDE controller on the motherboard that atleast supports ATA66/100 storage devices. while testing the transfer speed of the drive turn off antivirus and disk drive utility/or monitoring programs (if any).
and then see what happens?