Hard drive test errors

[rbrother]

We build industrial computers for one of our customers and have been using Burnin Test Pro for several years. Some time ago we upgraded the hardware to SATA controllers and drives. We use Western Digital 7,200 RPM hard drives. We run Burnin Test for 24 to 72 hours and the operating system is XP Pro SP3. Burnin Test version is V5.3 (1026). Random data with random seeking is used for the drive test.

On about 30% of our test machines we are experiencing "failure to verify data" failures. When we get these failures we use WD's software to do a complete surface test and the drive always passes.

The problem is our customer runs the same test as we do, sees the failure and rejects the machine. We had the same results using the default (cyclic) test. We test about 15 machines monthly.

What can we do to stop the errors?

Thanks, Roy

[David (PassMark)]

There was a bug (corrected a few months back) that sounds like the problem you are having.

On rare occasions a verification error is incorrectly displayed. This is during the random seeking phase of the "Random data with random seeking" test mode and only occurs with some specific test settings.

But this bug was corrected in 5.3 build 1026, 17/July/2008.

So can you check that you (and your client) are really already using build 1026.