Windows seems to be corrupting disks?!

[schwags]

Has anyone heard of any reason that I would be contantly be experiencing corrupted disks in windows 7 x64? I have run sector scans and they are clean. I have two large seperate hard drives besides my boot drive, a WD1001FALS and a WD2001FASS that I use for storage for personal items and backups of customer data while I work on their machine.

As you can probably imagine, the personal storage disk has many pictures, movies, my itunes library, and everyhing I have pickued up in the last 10 years that I want to save. These files are not moved around or changed too much as most of the stuff is there to stay. This disk gets occasional corruption

The customer data drive is a different strory. At any one time, I could be moving hundreds of Gb on and off of the drive. Sometimes in small files, or sometimes in large files such as an acronis backup archive. I just did a query on it and right now it has 770,000 files and 71,000 folders! I get corruption on this disk almost every other day.

Both of these disks are less than a year old and I constantly monitor their temp to be at or less than 40 degrees C. At idle, they are usually 35 degrees C. I have run HDDscan and the WD diagnostics tool on both of them, and saw no errors with the WD tools and only a few 'green' sectors with HDDscan. green sectors are sectors that take between 50 and 150 ms to access....SMART on both disk reports that everything is OK. All of the SATA cables are brand new too. The Motherboard is an Asus P5Q Pro Turbo that I bought to replace an Abit Quad GT that was exhibiting similar symptoms with different disks, but I think that time it was the disks as they did not return great sector scans.

Overall I have worked on disks that report much worse, yet work much better. It seems that almost every day now I am getting an error that states the disk structure is "corrupt or unreadable". I have to do a error checking scan to fix it. It always does fix the issue and sometimes gives me a 'found' folder with orphaned files inside. Sometimes these are whole customer folders!
Lately, I have been loosing acronis archives, they report a size of 0 and I loose everything in the archive. I am using acronis true image 11, NOT the latest version (2010?) that is very buggy...

I have tried disabling the automatic defrag, thinking that it may be interfering with something. Would moving and changing as much data as I am be the culprit. Am I trying to ask a consumer grade drive to do more than it is designed for? (but, WD black drives are known for being very robust) Is there a bug in the Win 7 file system that causes issues like this?? Any ideas??

Also, The install is about 6 months old, it was installed on a fresh clean seagate disk with no other OSs on that drive. It is a very clean standard install. I use AHCI mode for SATA, but no RAID setup too...

EDIT: I have since checked for storage controller driver updates and there are none to be had...

 

[vdub12]

Are you copying stuff over a network? It might be a permissions problem.

I use Linux on all of my systems and I store my customer data on an EXT4 partition and it seams to work flawlessly. However, I do sometimes have permission problems when creating files from the network on windows to a Linux partition. Mostly because samba does not specify a user and group for the new files. Its an easy fix I know but I have been to lazy to deal with it and its really easy to just chmod the whole storage folder.

 

[drewster]

Have you tried WDALIGN? I've had some weird problems with these new WD drives that utilize 4k sectors. Not sure if those drives are affected off the top of my head.

 

[Peaceful]

First thing to comes to my mind is unexpected shutdowns

 

[AustinB]

Have you tried different SATA ports or hooking the drives up to different computers altogether?

To me it would seem highly unlikely that Windows 7 is causing this issue. You seem to have done a good job testing the drives themselves, so I wonder about the SATA controllers on the MB. If it was Windows, why isn't your boot drive being affected?

Any overclocking going on? I'm not familiar with this particular MB, but Turbo sometimes seems to be shorthand for "we've overclocked it from the factory."

Also, I doubt you're pushing the drives too hard. You only need an enterprise drive if the thing is constantly being hammered by multiple users or something.

 

[schwags]

vdub - I am not using any linux systems here, but I think you might be onto something concerning permissions. I have the drives set for sharing with full control allowed to everyone. But, for some reason I cannot solve, R-Studio cannot write to the drive across a network. It states that access has been denied ect...

drewster - I have not tried that, and I will look into it, thanks!

Peaceful - I do not have any unexpected shutdowns, win 7 is very stable from my experience.

AustinB - I have tried switching out which sata ports are being used. I do not know why the boot drive is not effected, but all I can think of is that the problem seems to be proportional to the amount of files written to and erased from the drive on a daily basis. The c: drive gets a small amount of changes, the M: drive (media) gets a bit more, but not too much, and the T: drive (temp) gets a lot of read/write/erases on a daily basis.
I don't believe that this board is overclocked. it never struck me as a fast or fancy board. Maybe I should look into investing in a server board with ECC memory and more robust controllers?

 

[AustinB]

Do you have another computer you can hook these drives up to? Try that and copy a to of files onto them and see if you still have those problems.

Or even try putting them into USB enclosures. Whatever you can do to get data onto them without using your MB's SATA ports.

This really shouldn't be outside the scope of what average consumer hardware is capable of.