"Li'l ol' me" <richie42@***SPAMOFF**eidosnet.co.uk> wrote in message
news:be9avh$ltf$1@news6.svr.pol.co.uk...
Thanks for your replies so far guys.
While you're all still around....hello? Guys?
I've just been testing a few low-ish capacity (10 and 15gigs) Quantums and
white-label Quantums using Maxtor's Powermax. With two of these drives I
had tried several other utils and had found no problems whatsover. I then
tried the Powermax advanced test on one drive and it passes. But after
rebooting, it failed to ID on POSTing, and was making noises like there's a
pinball machine in there! I had none of that BEFORE the tests. When I
finally got one IDd and got back into Powermax, the basic installation test
failed on reading the partition info and SMART status.
Against my better judgement I tried the other drive that had seemed fine.
After all, they were cheap as chips to get hold of, and I'd had no similar
problems with other tests. But the same thing happened again, but this time
the pinging started as soon as the test ended. And it failed the basic
installation test again.
And both drives are then unable to even do a quick LLF.
Is it possible these tests can overstress a drive? I guess stressing them
is maybe the point, and I accept that the drives might have been a timebomb
anyway. But I can't help feeling they might never have got that stressed in
normal operation, and it might have be better not to test drives in this way
if all other tests work fine.
And going back to LLFing, Powermax gives the choice of a 'quick LLF' which
writes zeros (it says this) to the first 300mb and last 100mb or so, or a
full LLF. I have a drive which failed the advanced test, so I chose to LLF
using the full option, but it failed about 85% in. Is there anywhere to go
with a drive that fails at this level?
