non-issue Forum is Sluggish

[TechAngel85]

Since some of the tweaking and the slight downtime last night for a few minutes the forum has been very sluggish on user's systems. Two have confirmed so far. Using the mouse wheel to scroll down is like using a Windows 98 computer and watching it react in slow motion. The pages seem to also be loading up slower.

[TechAngel85]

I don't remember either but I know it's been restarted since then because I moved the computer downstairs recently. Oh well. One of those weird things I guess.

 

Now commencing my hard drive test... (and praying Windows install as well...if I have to RMA another drive it's not going to be pretty)

[z929669]

Wow. It is common practice for me never to leave my browser window open after a session. I rarely have more than one session running either.

 

I guess I am reliant on bookmarks and history. Browsers are resource hogs ;)

[TechAngel85]

It's official. Someone must die! Been testing for 3 hours and can't get the drive to formatting. It's only went two steps past my last drive. First drive wouldn't even pass POST. This second drive will get recognized, will partition, but will not format. Running WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics on it now. Fail the SMART test. Will be running the Extended Media test until morning to see if it'll do anything at all. It's been running for 7mins now without reading a single sector.

 

To RMA again...or get my money back and go with something else...this is the question.

 

WD used to have the best drives until this "blue, red, green, black"...pink, purple, rainbow crap. Even though the data connector is broken off my Caviler drive and it's "hillbilly rigged", it's still kicking strong after years of abuse! Excuse me while I go find someone from WD to murder.

 

EDIT:

Newegg is going to RMA the drive for free. Darn right!, because I was going to raise Hades if I had to pay out another $12 to ship it back with no guarantee of the third drive working or not. If the third one doesn't work I'm going to require them to either test it before they send it or refund my money with free return shipping to them and I'll go with another brand. Probably Seagate. I miss the days when hard drives were made to last!

Edited March 9, 2014 by TechAngel85

[stoppingby4now]

I agree. WD drives back in the late 90's were top notch. I had 5 brand new WD's fail on me awhile back, 2 DOA's, 3 spindles were going bad after about 6 months, failed in under a year. Just unacceptable. I stopped RMA'ing them and ditched them for good.

 

I've been mostly sticking to Seagate drives. It's been a long time since I've had one of those DOA, and I've only had one in the past 10 years fail prematurely (under a year). I even have a much older 500MB Seagate IDE drive installed in my Firewall box, and it's still purring.

 

Most of these varying drive types are ultimately a disguise for varying "acceptable" quality levels, wrapped in marketing jargon. It comes down to, you either pay top money for a product that has a much higher guarantee of quality and has been fully tested, or you pay much less for a product that has been deemed "good enough" or "acceptable risk" and shoved out the door without a moments thought. I don't know the practices of every manufacturer, but I've seen a manufacturer first hand take the "failed" Enterprise, RAID quality drives and demote them to Consumer level as long as the spindle still spun and data could be written/read, and the firmware re-flashed. These were 10K/15K drives, demoted to 5.2K to hide the issues.

[phazer11]

HGST drives are great, even though they are a WD subsidiary. I was also able to get a HITACHI Deskstar 7K3000 2TB 3.5" SATA 6.0Gb for $120 bucks a year or so ago and I'd buy 3-6 more in a heartbeat.

[stoppingby4now]

I have 4 Hitachi Deskstar's in an external chasis which have been running for just over 4 years now. I have had two DOA's in about 8 purchases, but no premature deaths so far.