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