[LiveBrianD]

A family member has an ASUS UL50a laptop with a Seagate ST9500325AS 500GB SATA HD (5400RPM). I just ran CrystalDiskInfo on it and it says Health status: caution. All values are normal, except the reallocated sectors count, which says Current:100, Worst:100, Threshold:36. Speedfan doesn't detect the HD in this laptop. Could this drive be nearing death It's only a year old. I have heard that Seagate has some quality control issues though.
http://dqkiuw.blu.li...info.png?psid=1


Edit: Apperantly the SpeedFan beta (which uses a whole new driver and detects the HD) thinks nothing of it.
http://dqkiuw.blu.li...dfan.png?psid=1

This post has been edited by LiveBrianD: 02 February 2011 - 08:32 PM

[SnyperTodd]

Is it making any noises? SMART isn't all it's cracked up to be. I've got a 9-year old 160GB Maxtor that has been in the 30% range for fitness since the day I bought it, and it's been completely reliable. If the hard drive itself isn't giving you any signs of imminent failure, I wouldn't worry about it. All of my Seagates that have died made noises (clicks or beep-type noises) before they bit the dust.

[mjd420nova]

The only hard drive tests I trust are the manufacturers. Too many of the aftermarket programs to monitor drive health don't have all the particulars for all drive types and mistake normal operation for imminent failure.

[coastie65]

Hi. If it isn't making any noise or showing another other type of anomalies, then you should be fine. No point in looking for trouble where there isn't any. The Seagate in here has been going for a year plus with no problems.

[crazy4laptops]

I had a WD 60GB drive (IDE 2.5") that had the same reallocated sectors count in SMART, just left it alone, reformatted the drive and installed XP on it, no problems ever since.

Now if you start getting corrupted files, be sure to remove all refrigerator/rare-earth magnets from the PC case (I learned that from a friend)

[coastie65]

crazy4laptops, on 03 February 2011 - 10:12 AM, said:

I had a WD 60GB drive (IDE 2.5") that had the same reallocated sectors count in SMART, just left it alone, reformatted the drive and installed XP on it, no problems ever since.

Now if you start getting corrupted files, be sure to remove all refrigerator/rare-earth magnets from the PC case (I learned that from a friend)

I would hope that you are kidding about sticking those thing on the side of a case. Use sticky notes if you must plaster stuff on there ( I plaster them underneath the top shelf of my desk ).

[waldojim]

If you are really concerned about the drive, I would suggest getting your hands on the single best hard drive recovery tool I have ever seen - GRC's Spinrite. It is not cheap, but for what it does and can do, I call it indispensable. If your hard drive really is developing bad sectors, this will find them, and if possible, actually recover them. By recover, I mean find a different way to read/write to that sector reliably, NOT just relocate it.
http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

Now, if you need something this extreme is up to you. But I can say, it has saved more than one hard drive of mine.

[LiveBrianD]

SnyperTodd, on 02 February 2011 - 08:31 PM, said:

Is it making any noises? SMART isn't all it's cracked up to be. I've got a 9-year old 160GB Maxtor that has been in the 30% range for fitness since the day I bought it, and it's been completely reliable. If the hard drive itself isn't giving you any signs of imminent failure, I wouldn't worry about it. All of my Seagates that have died made noises (clicks or beep-type noises) before they bit the dust.

The drive isn't making any odd noises. Later I'll try running the manufacturer tools on it (Seatools, right?).

[SnyperTodd]

waldojim, on 03 February 2011 - 03:36 PM, said:

If you are really concerned about the drive, I would suggest getting your hands on the single best hard drive recovery tool I have ever seen - GRC's Spinrite...

+1. Awesome tool, but on a big drive be prepared to let it run for a few days. We had a debate about this a few months ago about whether the price could be justified with drives as cheap as they are now, but really, if you've got a couple of VRaptors or it makes an inaccessible drive that wasn't properly backed up accessible again (which is something Spinrite can do) and you get back some irreplaceable pictures of your kids, it's well worth it. I've had Spinrite for a few years and I've more than gotten my money's worth.

[coastie65]

I am reminded of my old Commodore 64 & 128 Drives ( 5 1/4" Floppy ). The way the Copy protection was on the disks, the Read / Write head ( Arm ), would jump from sector to sector and you could hear that thnig banging around in there. You would have to realign that thing every so often as it got all out of whack. There was a utility for that, to check the alignment, but you had to physically realign the thing. They actually had a cardboard insert to put in the drive to keep the head from moving around before packing the drive for moving.

[LiveBrianD]

Oh crap, now I'm hearing the dreaded "Click of Death". I was shutting down the computer when a clicking noise started coming from the area where the HD is. It just sat there at the "shutting down" screen and I had to hold the power button to shut it down. Fortunately, it still boots properly. I just ordered a new drive (a WD this time, not Seagate) and I'll be installing it soon. http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822136197 I guess those stories to Seagate having quality control issues are true. The drive is a little more than 1 year old.

[crazy4laptops]

LiveBrianD, on 12 March 2011 - 01:04 PM, said:

Oh crap, now I'm hearing the dreaded "Click of Death". I was shutting down the computer when a clicking noise started coming from the area where the HD is. It just sat there at the "shutting down" screen and I had to hold the power button to shut it down. Fortunately, it still boots properly. I just ordered a new drive (a WD this time, not Seagate) and I'll be installing it soon. http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822136197 I guess those stories to Seagate having quality control issues are true. The drive is a little more than 1 year old.

The joys of the click of death... in a server rack with 12 active servers, it's very hard to hear which drive is dead, that means lugging a 40-pound server onto the workbench and pulling/replacing the bad drive. (yay for Raid5)

It sucks that the Seagate died so early, I hope your WD will last longer!

I have that WD320 in my HP dv5z, it works great! one can hear the spindle quite well, but WD has silenced most of the drive chatter. Me being able to hear the specific dynamics of a drive may because of my bat-like hearing, I can't quite hear like Radar O’Reilly, but it's close

This post has been edited by crazy4laptops: 12 March 2011 - 03:34 PM

[LiveBrianD]

The computer actually belongs to a family member. They said that it did that a few months ago, then stopped, then recently started doing it again. Until recently, I'd only heard about it, but not actually seen it.

I've had good experience with WD, so I don't think there will be problems with the new drive (it hasn't arrived yet though). The newegg reviews were 5/5.

[LiveBrianD]

It seems to have been working fine, no clicking, but...

When it was started today, windows started chkdsk, and it corrected several things and deleted some file indexes. The relocated sector count is still 100, like what I showed in the above screenshot. Again, speedfan reports nothing. The system appears to be running fine. Should I replace the drive or do you think it's still OK?

[coastie65]

If you have that WD, I wouldn't waste a lot of time transferring Date on to it..............just in case. Can never hurt and you will have a fall back in case that thing does crap out.

[LiveBrianD]

I kinda wonder though - the smart data doesn't report any issues aside from 1 bad sector. On the other hand, SMART isn't the smartest tool at this, is it? On the other hand, when it was shutdown today (ALWAYS shutdown), it started clicking, the same way it did before that and (from what I was told, I didn't actually see it) the time before that. Odd how it does it consistently and not often though.