Problems with spinning HD in optical bay

[dktrZERO]

Okay so to begin with, I am running a MacBookPro9,1 with OS X 10.8.5, 2.6 GHz Intel i7, 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 - Storage wise I have a 240GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD as my operating drive, and a 1TB 7200RPM HGST spinning drive for storage (in place of the optical drive, using OWC's data doubler).
My woes with the spinning drive started several months after I bought this system last year. The first sign of trouble was basically the drive totally crashing on me, forcing me to use data recovery software, and a total reformat. Things seemed okay for a couple of months, and then the same thing happened again. At this point I took steps to investigate what the issue might be.

Running Alsoft's Disk Warrior, I was presented with multiple "Diskwarrior speeds reduced by disk malfunction" (I think this was in the 20s or 30s of errors at the time), so I decided to send the drive in for an RMA since it was still under warranty.

The RMA drive (refurbished) came to me today, and I installed it, and then proceeded to start installing a fresh OS on the drive. However, the installer was taking an insanely long time, and started hanging at each step of the process, at which point I started to suspect something was not right.

I reformatted the drive to have it totally clean, and then ran DiskWarrior on it again. On this new-to-me drive, I'm already getting in the ballpark of 10 "disk malfunction" errors, and when the rebuild completed, I got the notification "The new directory cannot replace the original directory because of disk malfunction".

Now of course I understand this could just be my wretched luck, and I could have just received another bad drive from HGST. However, before I get back into slogging through another 3-week long RMA process, I'd like to eliminate any other possibilities.

Is there something else I can be checking, or double-checking, to confirm that the problem is indeed the hard drive itself, and not some other part of the system/setup which I hadn't considered?

If it helps at all, I also ran Blackmagic on the drive and came up with these speeds, which seem about right to me for this drive:
Write: 125 MB/s
Read: 130 MB/s

 

[simonsi]

The first sign of trouble was basically the drive totally crashing on me, forcing me to use data recovery software, and a total reformat. Things seemed okay for a couple of months, and then the same thing happened again.

A disk crash is a physical thing and normally will result in HDI (Head/Disk Interference - i.e. the heads hit the disk surface, they normally fly above it), and a physically trashed head and disk. It won't work okay for a couple of months at all.

So given that, what did you have - disk errors that were formatted out? That points more to a drive platter manufacturing issue....

 

[priitv8]

I did leave the spinning drive at the original spot due to better mechanical (cushioned) mounting used there.
And installed SSD in the SuperDrive bay, because SSD is tolerant to G-forces.
You might want to try swapping the drives. Although I remember having read somewhere that some MBP models had trouble booting from SuperDrive SATA port.

 

[dktrZERO]

Okay, to clarify the initial problem - correct, there was no mechanical error that I detected... basically the volume just stopped mounting one day, would not re-mount, and I had to run Data Rescue 3 to get my files off the drive. Reformatting brought it back to the usable state it had been in before.

As far as moving the drive into the other bay, everything I have read says exactly what you mentioned - the OS drive needs to be in the OEM HD bay. In fact, I work for a digital production company, and they have a number of MBPs specced out exactly like mine is. So I know the hardware configuration is viable - the question is just what is causing this problem? Is this just the coincidence of another malfunctioning drive? or is there some other systemic issue causing disk errors? And what steps can I take to test and eliminate each potential cause?

 

[priitv8]

As far as moving the drive into the other bay, everything I have read says exactly what you mentioned - the OS drive needs to be in the OEM HD bay.

My original unibody Pro (late 2008) had no trouble to boot from SSD mounted in optical bay.
If you don't carry your laptops around, then the mounting of HDD-s is more or less irrelevant.

 

[simonsi]

everything I have read says exactly what you mentioned - the OS drive needs to be in the OEM HD bay.

My early-2011 MBP runs just fine booting from the SSD in the drive caddy. Booting from a DVD in the optical drive is normal so there would appear to be no reason why booting from any drive in the Optical bay would be a problem.