Is my hard drive going bad?

[Tullphan]

I've recently began getting I/O errors when downloading files that I'm saving to me secondary internal WD6400AAKS drive.
I tried running Spinrite, but after it ran for over 36 hours, it gave me an error message that Gibson Research said was due to me not running in DOS mode. I downloaded and installed WD's diagnostic program. The first time I ran it, it took about f hours and showed no problems. After running into problems with ConvertX taking over 12 hours to attempt to convert and burn an AVI, I successfully downloaded a torrent file to my C drive and afterwards converted it in less than an hour.
I decided to run the WD diagnostic program on my secondary drive, starting it about 5:30 this morning. As of 6:00 this evening, it was still running and showed an estimated time remaining of almost 13 hours.
I'm beginning to think something's wrong with my hard drive. Are torrents to blame? Does downloading and seeding cause excessive wear and tear on the drive?
What do y'all think?

 

[faxon]

download HDTune or another program which has SMART tools in it and see if it find anything bad in SMART. and most drives are warrantied for 5 years (some WD ones are 3 but eh), which means that they should in theory be able to run non stop for 5 years, though obviously they can fail sooner. does sound like a bad drive, though i doubt torrents alone would do that, as they dont put a heavy load on the drive unless you are doing a lot of seeding and downloading at high bandwidths (usually most torrents are kinda slow). anything in the KB range for average transfers tho, the OS itself does more traffic than that to the drive on a regular basis so i highly doubt that would kill the drive

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: faxon
...most drives are warrantied for 5 years (some WD ones are 3 but eh), which means that they should in theory be able to run non stop for 5 years..

Reminds me of when IBM declared that its DeathStar drives weren't defective, but rather, were being abused. IBM insisted that, as consumer-based drives, they were only designed to be run about eight hours a day.

While there's probably some sort of relationship, it'd be tough to relate hard drive life to "hard use". But I'm pretty sure I burned up one brand-new drive that was copying files for 48 hours straight in a crowded, hot, drive bay. The drive was too hot to touch when it failed. But I've seen hard drives that were only turned on once a month fail, too.

 

[Tullphan]

I ran a quick test using the WD program and it said it passed the SMART test.
I don't understand the test results, however. It's got a column for "Value", "Threshold", "Worst", and "Warranty". Does anyone that's familiar with that program understand what the numbers in those columns mean?

 

[Tullphan]

Anyone?

 

[RebateMonger]

Here's some information that should help. Each drive maker can add stuff. The "Warranty" column is likely something specific to the drive maker.

Wikipedia.org - SMART

Maybe somebody will come up with some better answers. I've never looked very hard at the SMART data (partly because the drive makers have made the whole system very conservative to avoid "false positives".

 

[Tullphan]

The only drives I had before that went bad (Maxtor), made a quite noticeable sound.
This is still a quiet running drive.
Will WD be able to tell by the SMART status report whether it's going bad or not?

 

[Elixer]

Originally posted by: Tullphan
The only drives I had before that went bad (Maxtor), made a quite noticeable sound.
This is still a quiet running drive.
Will WD be able to tell by the SMART status report whether it's going bad or not?

In short, not unless your one of the few lucky ones.

Most of the time, the HDs fail with no warning from SMART at all.