Hi, Three yrs ago I bought a 2004 Hitachi 40 gig, ide,7200rpm, 8meg cache laptop drive. I installed it in my daughters laptop which she was using at Uni. Three months later she rang to say the comp kept crashing . I got her to bring it home and replaced it with another make.
I then ran the Hitachi diag software on it which reported all Ok, just to be safe I ran the initialisation prog. I then placed it in my laptop and started to install Xp on it. During the install it reported several times that files where missing. After playing around with it for several hours I came to the conclusion that the first several gigs of the drive were flaky and created a 6 gig partition.( probably where it kept crashing, I found out later that she was playing DVD films on it and having the laptop on her bed , i.e. overheating ). I then installed the OS on the remainder which went as per a normal ( good ) . I removed it from my laptop and placed it in a draw for storage.
About a week ago I decided to use it and installed it in my laptop. It booted up Ok and DL all the latest XP updates. After a couple of days I got the SMART message at bootup saying imminent failure. I have spent the last three days installing and reinstalling, defragging etc to see if I could make it fail. However it just keeps going smooth and ghostly quiet.
The drive has had little use, so my questions are, Is it going to fail soon, what happens when it fails. And is it possible that although it has been very lightly used the fact that it is seven yrs old is causing the SMART message?
I only use the laptop to surf the Web so am not bothered about losing any data if and when it crashes.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
regards,
Eddie.

@eddiebelfast:

The exact algorithms used by manufacturers to decide when to trigger a SMART warning, are proprietary. No-one can tell you if the drive is going to fail soon or not, and not all types of failure are obvious - you might just start to get more unreadable sectors, or the drive may start to take longer & longer to spin-up, or Windows may start to hang and misbehave, or ...

If you want to continue using the drive, in the knowledge that it has declared itself to be untrustworthy (which is effectively what a SMART warning is), then obviously you can do that and take a risk that it'll become unusable at an inconvenient time, and with a loss of the data on it.

If you run one of the many utilities which can extract the raw SMART values from the drive (HDDScan for Windows, available free from this site or from hddscan.com is one such utility), and then provide that SMART data here, we can get a slightly better idea of the drive's view of its own health. However it is extremely unlikely that anyone would be able to tell if this is a "false positive" SMART warning.

Given that (at least in my experience) new IDE laptop drives are getting more & more difficult to find, as the market for them is getting smaller, you may want to consider your plan for when that current drive does fail - soon or not.

There are TONS of IDE 2,5" drives available on the market as their use is NOT limited to laptops.

So said, check the cause first i.e. repeated uncontrolled shutdown or HW / SW problems, SMART is not always a big problem. A decent professioanl should be able to diag and eventually fix the problem (NO, not usual PC repair shop) for a small fee.

As I said above, in my experience new IDE laptop drives are getting more difficult to find - or to put it another way, the range is becoming more limited (for example, try to find a new 40GB replacement drive (same size as the OP's) now - you could do so a few years ago easily, from around 5 manufacturers; try to do that now. Instead of having a choice of such drives from multiple manufacturers, these days I see them available new from just 2 - Samsung & WD, and that is when they are in stock). Other people (as BlackST asserts above) may have different experience. That's fine, we all have different experiences. Note that I didn't deliberately mention anything about second-hand or refurbs.

Checking the usual online retail outlets for new IDE laptop drives in the UK (where both the OP and I are located), over the past few years, my experience about availability of new IDE laptop drives, is as I stated above. YMMV

Gentlemen, thankyou for your replies. I have several spare drives for my laptop. Reason for having them is much to do with the point made re-lack of manufacturers etc. The reason I use the Hitachi is for the speed i.e. 7200rpm/8 meg cache. Also whilst there are plenty of second hand drives ala 5400/4200 there are very few new 7200's, or even used models.
I was more interested as to why a drive with such little use shows a SMART message.

Edit: I seem to remember an 072 figure came up when using the Hitachi diag, although I could be mistaken.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this.


I see 3 choices (other people may see more) - either pay a DR company for a diagnosis, as BlackST suggested; or gather the raw SMART data and post it here, in case there is something obvious, as I suggested; or do nothing and live with the unanswered curiosity. Your choice

HDDScan S.M.A.R.T. Report
Model: HTE726040M9AT00
Firmware: MHAOA6AA
Serial: MRH4X5M4GXU3VB
LBA: 78140160

Report By: HDDScan for Windows version 3.3
Report Date: 15/09/2011 09:06:37


Num Attribute Name Value Worst Raw(hex) Threshold

001 Raw Read Error Rate 100 100 0000000000-0000 062

002 Throughput performance 100 100 0000000000-0000 040

003 Spin Up Time 154 154 0000190000-0002 033

004 Start/Stop Count 099 099 0000000000-0C15 000

005 Reallocation Sector Count 001 001 0000000000-0000 005

007 Seek Error Rate 100 100 0000000000-0000 067

008 Seek time Perfomance 100 100 0000000000-0000 040

009 Power-On Hours Count 100 100 0000000000-0126 000

010 Spin Retry Count 100 100 0000000000-0000 060

012 Device Power Cycle Count 099 099 0000000000-0BB7 000

191 G-sense Rate/Servo tracking 100 100 0000000000-0000 000

192 Emergency Retract Count 097 097 0000000000-02F1 000

193 Load/unload Cycle Count 100 100 0000000000-0F39 000

194 HDA Temperature 137 137 40 C 000

194 HDA Temperature Maximum 137 137 67 C 000

194 HDA Temperature Minimum 137 137 09 C 000

196 Reallocation Event Count 100 100 0000000000-1326 000

197 Current Pending Errors Count 089 089 0000000000-02C1 000

198 Uncorrectable Errors Count 100 100 0000000000-0000 000

199 UltraDMA CRC Errors 200 200 0000000000-0008 000

PM sent