Hard Drive problem: is it the SATA controller or the HDD itself?

Posted by Drooling_Sheep on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Drooling_Sheep
Published on 2011-04-05T16:35:52Z Indexed on 2012/10/10 15:41 UTC
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Filed under:

ubuntu

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hard-drive

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motherboard

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sata

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hardware-failure

I have a Samsung 1.5TB hard drive hooked up to an ECS H55H-I mini-ITX motherboard. I have XBMC 10 (modified Ubuntu 10.04) installed for use as an HTPC. The hard drive encounters occasional errors during normal use which cause it to be remounted read-only. I have updated the BIOS on the motherboard, changed the SATA cable and moved it to different ports on the motherboard, installed and re-installed the OS (including different versions of XBMC and generic ubuntu), all to no avail. I recently ran tests both with badblocks -sv and smartctl -t long. Both reported no errors.

This makes me think the motherboard or SATA controller is probably the issue. Does anyone know of any further tests I can do to help narrow this down?

The processor is a Core i3. I forget the model number but it's one of the 32nm ones with on-package graphics. There's no discrete video card or optical drive. The power supply is a 150W Rosewill (pretty sure) that came with the case.

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