Dying ST3500320AS

[uvwxyz]

I have a rapidly dying ST3500320AS that's been growing uncorrectable bad sectors over the past few days. The drive times out when trying to read certain sectors on the disk even though it will seemingly write to them without error.

I don't care about recovery (everything is backed up) but I am a little curious about what might have killed the drive. It's had an easy life, spent mostly as a media storage drive in a well-ventilated PC with a quality PSU. No drops or power spikes.

Is there typical cause of progressive failure for 7200.11 drives under these circumstances?

SMART data is below. I've noticed that both attributes 197 and 198 have been increasing in unison while attribute 5 remains constant. I take this to mean the drive is detecting new bad sectors but can't remap them.

Code:

smartctl 5.42 2011-06-16 r3380 [i686-w64-mingw32-win7(64)-sp1] (cf-win32-20110616)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate Barracuda 7200.11
Device Model:     ST3500320AS
Serial Number:    [No Information Found]
Firmware Version: SD14
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   [No Information Found]
ATA Standard is:  [No Information Found]
Local Time is:    Sun May 06 14:37:36 2012 PDT

[portions cut --uvwxyz]

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   090   086   ---    Pre-fail  Always       -       189922774
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0003   094   094   ---    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   ---    Old_age   Always       -       177
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   ---    Pre-fail  Always       -       9
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000f   075   060   ---    Pre-fail  Always       -       8667591153
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   071   071   ---    Old_age   Always       -       25761
10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013   100   100   ---    Pre-fail  Always       -       4
12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   037   ---    Old_age   Always       -       177
184 End-to-End_Error        0x0032   100   100   ---    Old_age   Always       -       0
187 Reported_Uncorrect      0x0032   001   001   ---    Old_age   Always       -       1847
188 Command_Timeout         0x0032   100   096   ---    Old_age   Always       -       21475164168
189 High_Fly_Writes         0x003a   097   097   ---    Old_age   Always       -       3
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022   067   049   ---    Old_age   Always       -       33 (Min/Max 28/35)
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   033   051   ---    Old_age   Always       -       33 (0 12 0 0)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x001a   041   022   ---    Old_age   Always       -       189922774
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   ---    Old_age   Always       -       27
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   ---    Old_age   Offline      -       27
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x003e   200   200   ---    Old_age   Always       -       0



[BlackST]

This data won't tell about the 'cause' , should read internal logs that you can't access. There is also another option : refurbishing (again, not DIY !) .