Ok I came here about a month ago worried about this and I came to the conculsion that it was just a loud hard-drive and someone told me it was just a normal sound.


Well maybe not.

First off.

I have two Hitachi Deskstar in raid 0
I have not notice any "slow" downs
I do not crash or freeze.
I can only hear the drives when its doing something very heavy scans/defrag
I have run Hitachi's disk test program on a dvd on boot up and both drives passed the quick test twice
I have check Nvidia S.M.A.R.T and run the test several times and they have passed - it also displays they drives as Healthy
I have tried downloading uninstalling and reinstalling the nForce drives for my motherboard. (This worked for a bit but this error returned.)

The error I get is.

Access failure: Critical error on disk Hitachi HDT725032VLA360 (Port: SATA 1.0).

I have no clue whats going on anymore, if its drives, if its vista, if its deing. I don't know anymore and I have no clue whats going on anymore.
Some insight would be great!

hi Zakane , welcome to the pchf , im sure one of our wonderful team will be able to give you some advice on this issue .

i will mark your thread as open for one of our tech members to take a look and offer you some advice

plz be patient though as thay can get very busy at times ,

Cool, thanks for the quick reply John!

Hi

It may be nothing but a need for firmware update on the -notorious-Hitachi drives, but then again, could be not...

Check your HDD's S.M.A.R.T. records(please, ignore NVIDIA's report):

Download the free program SMARTUDM - HDD S.M.A.R.T. Viewer

Put the program on a boot floppy or a bootable USB stick and boot from it.

(To make a USB drive bootable:

HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool - v2.1.8 Download - EXTREME Overclocking)

Chose "Create a DOS startup disk, using DOS System Files Located at:" then point to a bootable floppy and copy the bootfiles from there)

After you boot your system from the floppy (or the USB), on the prompt type: smartudm
Select the first drive of your system, and keep pressing <ENTER> until the program asks you to press R to generate a report.
Generate the report and then do the same for the second disk.

I windows, open the reports with Notepad, save them as .txt (makes viewing easier) and post them here.

Also:can you please post your system's specifications?

While I download and do the bootable USB I'll go ahead and post my system specs. Also can I burn this to a dvd and work the same or do I have to do a usb bootable? Since I have no floppy drive on this computer.


I am running:

Windows Vista 32 bit Home Premium - SP2
4 gigs of Corsair XMS2 ram
8800 Nvidia GT 512 Megs video card
850 Watt power supply
Nvidia 780i Motherboard
Intel Duo Core E6850 3.0 Ghz

Also note I just got done doing a Disk Check and repair - no issues were found.

UPDATE:
Uhm well since I have no floppy drive, not sure how to get the dos files onto my usb thumbdrive...saying no DOS files found.

You can try the CD option:Bootdisk.Com Popular Files

As for the Hitachi disks, it's not that they are problematic, but there are firmware issues that force systems to report the drives as failed, or failing.

Aye, thats what I am thinking as well - since I ran Hitachi program from their site and the disk pass everytime and Dskchk comes out ok - there no slow down or crashes or freezes.

I'll try to get a bootable dvd going and get back to you with my finding.