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Old September 17th 09, 10:17 PM posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Rod Speed
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Default I think I've solved my Spin Retry Count problem

Yousuf Khan wrote

I have stated previously that I have an older drive that seems to get a lot of Spin Retry Counts in SMART, but other
than that it's rock solid: it has outlasted a whole bunch of newer drives that were previously giving no error
messages whatsoever in SMART. Well, it looks like I've now also solved its Spin Retries too.


Here's the older thread for reference:


comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage | Google Groups


http://groups.google.com/group/comp....n+spin+retr y

Well anyway, what I did recently was that I converted two of those old IDE drives into SATA drives using an
IDE-to-SATA converter board that fits right onto the back of the drives themselves. I started noticing that the Spin
Retries were gone about two weeks ago,


Gone from what report ? They shouldnt go from the Everest SMART
report, the raw value is a total and should just stop increasing.

but that was only a week after I installed them, so I didn't want to say anything until I saw a bit more time pass.
Well, it's now the three week mark, and I haven't seen any additional spin retries!


Presumably thats what you meant and the previous is just poorly worded.

I've also rebooted the system quite a bit more often than I usually do in that time. HD Sentinel is also now starting
to upgrade its Health rating automatically, it had gone down to 40% at its lowest and today it's at 52%.


I've never considered those numbers are very useful, what matters is the raw value.

I had previously suspected the IDE cables to be the culprits, so I did
change them, but that didn't help any at that time. So at that point I
began suspecting the drive itself was getting old (which it is). Looks
like now that it's going through SATA cables instead of IDE ones, that
the cables were the culprit, even with the newer IDE cables. I'm not
sure if this is endemic to IDE cables in general, or if it was just
two bad IDE cables in a row.


Its much more likely to be a lot more complicated than that.

What else did you change when you moved from IDE to SATA ?

Did you change the motherboard or power supply ?

The old thread did say you upgraded the power supply.
Did you see the spin retry count keep increasing after that ?

The only raw value you did post wasnt that high, just 20.