Hello.

I've been keeping an eye on my Maxtor 6L160P0 160GB ATA drive for some time now. It is a 6-7 year old drive that has been running for about 98% of its life. It's never exhibited any particular problems but recently some of its SMART data is worrying me. I've run a check with SpeedFan and produced the following data.

http://www.hddstatus.com/hdrepshowrepor ... n=16F5D1C6

At first my only concern was Soft Read Error Rate and Run Out Cancel, because they are values I've found on the internet to be of particular importance. But the thing is these values never got worse. In fact, contrary to information on the internet that these values should never go down and only increase, I often see them reset to 0, indeed as I write this post the SER has dropped to 6. At that point I downloaded SeaTools and a complete scan revealed no issues.

However, the overall picture of the drive continues to get worse. The Seek Time Performance has increased to a very high value and the Spin Up Time, which I believe is expressed in miliseconds, is ridiculous. I rarely ever power cycle my PC and the drive does not have power saving, so the only time it gets to spin up is if the computer is turned off. The current SUT is at over 18 seconds, way longer than my other 3 drives, among which a WD 80GB Caviar that is 9 1/2 years old and has only a 2.2 sec SUT.

I also looked online at the drive's specs and found, much to my dismay, that its MTBF is at around 50000 hours, or 5.7 years, whereas every other drive I have has 500000 hours or more.

So the question is: should I be worried about impending mechanical failure? Has anyone had any experiences of this sort with drives? What can I expect? How much should I care?

That URL redirects to http://www.hddstatus.com/hdrepanalysis.php.

:?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

My bad. I thought the link takes directly to my specific diagnostic! Well, most parameters have normalized now, and so I can't provide another reading like that one just yet. The drive was rated at 77% performance and fitness, by far the lowest in my set. But from the description thus far, does that sound suspicious?

My suggestion is to compare your SMART data against others.

Here are a few:

http://www.ureader.de/msg/12163636.aspx
(03) Spin Up Time 211 206 63 13858 Ok
(08) Seek Time Performance 249 246 187 50590 Ok

http://www.digipedia.pl/usenet/thread/19509/4012/
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 252 252 063 Pre-fail Always - 730
8 Seek_Time_Performance 0x0027 248 235 187 Pre-fail Always - 54680

http://www.keltainenporssi.fi/ilmoitus/ ... -207192249
(03) Spin Up Time 204 204 63 18394 ok
(08) Seek Time Performance 252 236 187 47544 ok

http://www.sosordi.net/Depannage/158069 ... raveur-dvd
03 Spin Up Time 63 201 200 16278 OK (la valeur est normale)
08 Seek Time Performance 187 246 236 52713 OK (la valeur est normale)

http://forum.telecharger.01net.com/tele ... ges-1.html
03 Spin Up Time 63 252 252 1550 OK (la valeur est normale)
08 Seek Time Performance 187 252 249 56518 OK (la valeur est normale)

http://it.narkive.com/2005/12/21/277494 ... cchia.html
3 (03) Spin Up Time 63 200 200 17153
8 (08) Seek Time Performance 187 248 242 46054

http://m.prohardver.hu/tema/hdd-k_megbi ... 1-321.html
03 Spinup Time 63 207 207 17307 Rendben: Az érték normális
08 Seek Time Performance 187 248 240 40481 Rendben: Az érték normális

http://attachments.techguy.org/attachme ... /specs.txt
03 Spinup Time 63 223 210 9523 OK: Value is normal
08 Seek Time Performance 187 243 233 44428 OK: Value is normal

http://www.acegames.us/forum/attachment ... 660.attach
03 Spin Up Time 63 207 207 7439 OK: Value is normal
08 Seek Time Performance 187 246 246 39773 OK: Value is normal

http://www.spotlight-wissen.de/archiv/m ... 39048.html
03 Spin Up Time 63 207 207 6290 OK: Wert ist normal
08 Seek Time Performance 187 248 245 61126 OK: Wert ist normal

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.