250gb Mystery

[Darkcon]

Hi
I've got a 250gb ST3200822A firmware 3.01 HD here, that started showing blue screens etc over a course of 6 months(I thought it was the ram at first, and could possibly have been I had a bad stick of that too)

I ran seatools tests on it, and the short tests pass and the long tests didnt

I took the pcb off it, and noticed the contacts on it were pitch black(from sulfur corrosion)


After cleaning them up, it still failed the tests, so, I stuck it in an anti static bag and left it

Till a couple months ago when I was off to a lan and needed some space, so I took it with me incase

one of the guys there told me to put it on its own ide cable, and partition/format it, and I did, and i managed to fill it, get home, transfer it all to my 500gig, with no corruption

I thought it was a little odd, and maybe it worked, and put it in my xbox, where it screwed up again, so it went back on the shelf, today I pulled it out, and its passing the long and short seatools tests, and all the other tests

the only difference is, in the old tests, I had it on one of the ide cables with the thin wires(80 cable?) and on the tests i've done today, and copying at the lan, I used a thick wired cable(old 40 cable?)

Is there any major difference between the too?

[suraswami]

as far my knowledge, 40 reduces the speed to ATA66/33.

[DanTheBanjoman]

Originally Posted by suraswami

as far my knowledge, 40 reduces the speed to ATA66/33.

33, 66 and higher require 80 pin cables. Could be that the harddrive fails at high speeds, wouldn't be the first part that works fine when speed is reduced.

[Darkcon]

do you think it possible for a hard drive in such condition to contiue to run stable for a decent amount of time? the damn thing in smart says 16168 power on hours(tho i've been told diff makes have it set differently to seconds, minutes, hours)

I have a friend with an old computer he uses for his music editing, and its got 40 wire cables, I figured I'd give it to him to supplement his 10gig hd lol