WD Caviar Black 1TB HD - RMA or not?

[icelt]

As I mentioned in my "cheap PC" build thread I've been having some issues with my computer that I'm pretty certain I've isolated to the HD.

A brief recap. Beginning maybe a month after building my PC I began to experience weird little errors and hiccups. These included intermittent freezes in FireFox (3 & 4 beta), occasional failures to shut down properly and odd stuttering with YouTube videos. For several weeks I couldn't figure out what the heck the issue was, I tried various tweaks for FF, updated all my drivers, rolled back my VC driver, etc and basically limped along. Then last week it all came to a head where I couldn't even get safe mode to boot consistently. Needless to say I was getting frantic.

Finally I managed to get a full checkdisk scan completed, which seemed to help things immensely, and then thanks to a recommendation I downloaded HDTune. The HDT health check produced the following:

As suggested I proceeded to switch the SATA cables between the HD and DVD drive. Since I made this switch the error count total has remained steady at 1,164,705. Also the computer has been rock steady since the cable switch. So it seems that I identified the problem and the fix is working.

Buttttt... I mean in all honesty it's like the lottery, people do win the lottery but you will never win the lottery. Bad cables do occur in nature but it is never really the cable, especially a brand new cable that hasn't been messed with. Right. I mean right, "it is never the cable" . So I'm scared/concerned that potentially there is something wrong with the drive itself, most likely the controller as the HDT surface scan came back 100% green.

FWIW here is my drive's benchmark graph:

So what do you guys think, should I play it safe and RMA the drive or should I feel comfortable that I've successfully identified and resolved my problem?

 

[GilesGuthrie]

I know you said you updated all your drivers, but what's your onboard drive controller? I have an Intel Matrix controller, and I had all kinds of issues with it marking drives as failed, which I cured with a software update. And, I know you said you updated all your drivers, but Intel keep changing the name of their controller software, so you have to update to the latest product, not the latest version.

Cables can be faulty, especially since the ends of the cable represent the breaks in the wire.

You're keeping nightly backups though, right?

 

[icelt]

I know you said you updated all your drivers, but what's your onboard drive controller? I have an Intel Matrix controller, and I had all kinds of issues with it marking drives as failed, which I cured with a software update. And, I know you said you updated all your drivers, but Intel keep changing the name of their controller software, so you have to update to the latest product, not the latest version.

Cables can be faulty, especially since the ends of the cable represent the breaks in the wire.

You're keeping nightly backups though, right?

Here's the driver according to the Device Manager:

Agreed cables can be/go bad, just seems really unlikely to be a brand new cable vs a brand new drive.

Not too concerned about backing stuff up ATM, still a recent build and there really isn't anything too vital on it yet... well except for my DoW2 save games . Thanks for the reminder though.