S.M.A.R.T. Hard Drives

[JohnB]

Last night I got a message stating one of the hard drives in the computer might fail before too long. This is determined using the S.M.A.R.T. hard drive technology. It monitors many internal readings on a hard drive to let the user know if they will fail sometime in the future.

Has anyone else ever gotten a SMART drive message? How long did you wait before changing out the drive?

 

[Stargazer]

How old is your computer, what is the brand name, and who manufactures the hard drive?

 

[JWHITE]

Just had a three year old Maxtor giving that type of SMART error. It lasted about 2 more days until most of the drive was inaccessable. Try to get an immediate backup if possible.

Run the manufacturers diagnostics to see if it is fixable or needs to be sent in for warranty repair or replacement for non-warranty. I sent in a noisy and dead 60 GB and got an 80 GB quiet drive back. It now resides in my Dishplayer so I don't wake up at 3am each night for the hard drive spin up.

Jay

 

[JohnB]

I did end up replacing the drive a couple of days later. I downloaded a program called Active SMART from http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/index.html and it pointed out that the pool of reserve sectors the drive uses to replace bad ones had been used up. I upgraded to a Maxtor 160GB drive and was able to copy 99% of my old files.

The Active SMART utility is kind of neat. It will let you see the current temperature (if your drive supports this) of your drive.

 

[HarryD]

That SMART technology works very well. I have seen it in Compaq workstations. Heed the warning and get another drive. Make the failing drive a slave and install into your PC and hope you can still access the data.