New Hard Drive Problems

[ledzep2acdc]

I recently purchased a 300GB Maxtor hard drive through Newegg.com and while i was formatting it, my dad had turned off the computer while i was out. I tried to format it again but it was taking horrendously long. I tried a quick format(that worked) but now when i restart the computer, a message pops up saying that there is something wrong with my hard drive. I downloaded SMART and it said that there is something wrong with the reallocated sector count(the fifth one down from the top) with a value of 1. I did a benchmark of the transfer rates and it was very low, being speratic unlike my working hard drive which is more or less smoother. I tried HDD recovery which found no bad sectors and another program which found no errors. I tried the powermax software by maxtor and the quick test said to do an advanced test but that took horrendously long. I tried putting some data on it, worked fine. I put Windows XP on it as a master drive without my other one and it operates very very slow. Anyone have any suggestions?

PS thanks for taking the time to read ;)

[bigH2O]

You didn't mention the specific model of the drive you purchased. Have you checked the benchmark results you obtained against the published benchmarks for the drive? Go here (http://www.storagereview.com/comparison.html) for independant 3rd party benchmark results, and try to locate your specific drive and the specific benchmarks you ran for comparison.

You didn't say which benchmark program you used, but give this (http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach) one a try for some pretty thorough results that you can compare against the manufacturers stated benchmarks.

It's never a good idea to interrupt a formatting procedure, but it sounds like you checked the drive out pretty thoroughly. If the results from the benchmarks come close to matching the specs from the manufacturer or a 3rd party, then you just have a slow drive. If the results are way off the published specs, then you either have a defective drive or you have a bottleneck somewhere in the I/O subsystem.

[lmnobs]

Did you let the Power Max prog finish ? I know it's slow but it will determine if the drive is Kaput or too many bad sectors bigH20is prob right about a defective drive if you did all the rest.

[ledzep2acdc]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144237
Maxtor MaxLine III 7L300R0 300GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA133 Hard Drive
Model #: 7L300R0

All i've read are great reviews. I went back to powermax and did an advanced test and everything went ok with my HD 'passing the test'. What does the 'burn in test' do by the way?

the benchmark prog i used was hdtune 2.51. I used that and the actual SMART program for the 1 value of reallocated sector count(flagged red bad alert etc). Do i need to 'flash the BIOS' or something like that?

thanks for the help but gotta run right now, ap physics mid term tomorrow morning.