Hi folks,
I searched all over the internet for an answer before posting, but I’m giving up for now.
I bought a new Caviar Black 1TB yesterday to replace a possibly flaky Caviar SE16 640GB (the 6400AAKS). I made sure to take a snapshot of the Caviar Black’s SMART status on first bootup, using HDTune 2.55 as my SMART status reader. I quick formatted the drive (in hindsight maybe should’ve done a full format…), partitioned it to 160GB (for the OS) and the rest for data storage. I then proceeded to copy about 200GB worth of data to the 2nd partition. Finally I installed Windows Vista Business 64-bit on the 1st partition.
Today I took a look at the Caviar Black’s SMART status and everything looks fine (no read or write errors or bad sectors found) but the “Hardware ECC Recovered” field has changed greatly!
Here’s what the field said when the Caviar Black was unused {Current 100, Worst 253, Threshold 0, Data 0, Status OK}
Now it says {Current 1, Worst 1, Threshold 0, Data 32482784, Status OK}.
What does the ‘Hardware ECC Recovered’ field mean? It sounds like some measure of data errors that were corrected by the harddrive’s ECC mechanism. From what I read online, the normalized SMART values are worse the smaller they are…in this case the Current and Worst values are 1 which is as low as it gets.
I tried a bunch of things like using new SATA cables, changing to different SATA ports but the field status for “Hardware ECC Recovered” data readout always hovers around that number. Current and Worst continues to stay at 1.
I also tried running the WD diagnostics but I keep getting cable test errors in Vista. I tried running the DOS version from the CDROM at boot but it complains that it can’t find the license file (although the file is clearly there)…
Performance seems to inline with reviews I’ve read. Using HDTune and HDTach to benchmark, the drive averages about 89MB/s, starting around 110MB/s and ending around 60MB/s as it moves towards the end of the drive. Seek times around 13ms, which is also okay.
Please let me know if I should be getting this drive exchanged; or if this is normal. Include technical explanations if possible…I would like to hear it.
Thanks.
EDIT:
Here are some screenshots.
Caviar Black 1TB new (date 12-14-2009)
Caviar Black 1TB one day old (12-15-2009)