indications of a HD failure?

[xyyz]

i've noticed a lot of these errors lately, and the HD is acting odd. there's this strange and very faint series of beeps coming from the system. just a few mins ago, the HD wasn't detectable.

i've run speedfan's SMART indepth online analysis and the drive comes up as 88% healthy, but there are 3 attributes that don't score within the safe limits.

Raw Read Error Rate 53 165415432 Watch
Warning: Raw Read Error Rate is below the average limits (54-65).
Hardware ECC Recovered 53 165415432 Watch
Warning: Hardware ECC Recovered is below the average limits (54-65).

is this a sign of an impending HD failure, or could the problem be elsewhere? is it a cable issue, or a controller issue?

btw, here are the errors in event viewer:

 

[Rubycon]

Change out your cable?

 

[Jeff7]

Get something like AIDA32 or Everest Home Edition (Still available at Oldversion.com) and post your full SMART readout. They've got the option to just Right-click and copy the entire SMART output to the clipboard.
Based on those numbers you gave, I'm going to guess that it's a Seagate drive. If so, they always have high rates for Read Errors, Seek Errors, and Hardware ECC Errors. Other drives probably just don't report these numbers. I tend to look out primarily for Write Errors, and Reallocated/Pending Sectors.

 

[xyyz]

thanks for the response.

i haven't swapped out the cable yet, and here's the SMART results for the drive:

 

[Jeff7]

Ah, yup, Seagate. Note too that Everest says that it's "OK".

Here is an example of the SMART readout of one of my Seagate drives.

The only thing that seems odd in that readout of yours is the Ultra ATA CRC Error Rate. I've not seen one that high before.

Yes, do try a new cable. Event Viewer should definitely not be showing write errors. And perhaps try downloading Seagate's diagnostic tools to see what they think.