Should I be worried about my HDD?

[St0ry]

I just ran Seatools on 2 Maxtor IDE drives and both of them showed SMART failed. However, they passed both the short and long test. Should I be worried about my drive failing in the near future? Thanks

 

[Dahak]

it would depend on what the smart error is. if its something about not being able to read the smart status properly it would be fine, if it anything else i probably would replace it

my personal take with errors on hard drives, if there is one, there could be a chance of failure and depending on what is stored on that drive why risk losing the data.

 

[myocardia]

Welcome to anandtech. My personal thoughts on hard drives failing are that you should always have hard copies (CD's or DVD's) of any data that's importnt to you. Then, it doesn't matter what the diagnostic software thinks. If/when the HD fails, you've lost nothing.

 

[RebateMonger]

SMART errors are pretty uncommon. The drive makers made it very conserative to avoid false alarms. Personally, if I had a SMART error, I'd replace the drive. ESPECIALLY if it's a Maxtor from the 2004-2005 timeframe. Right now, I don't have a SINGLE Maxtor drive from that timeframe that hasn't already failed. That's six of them.

 

[St0ry]

Thanks for the replies. I guess I'll look around for a new HDD, it's about time to upgrade to SATA eh?

 

[taltamir]

Usually a drive fails without SMART error... I have seen three smart errors so far (on customer's computers) I put in a new HDD (in addition to the one errorring) and started a HDD to HDD copy... the smart erroring drive failed halfway through the transfer on all three cases...
I would get your IMPORTANT data off of it first, and then replace it...

However, there is one cavet. BOTH drives are erroring at ONCE. so it could be an issue with your motherboard. Can you give us a little more info about your set up, are those brand new drives? how long have you had that motherboard? are there other drives connected to that mobo that are not giving errors? etc...

It is entirely possible for a faulty motherboard, or more likely, a faulty power supply, to cause multiple hard drives to fail at once, or in short succession.

 

[EarthwormJim]

Originally posted by: myocardia
Welcome to anandtech. My personal thoughts on hard drives failing are that you should always have hard copies (CD's or DVD's) of any data that's importnt to you. Then, it doesn't matter what the diagnostic software thinks. If/when the HD fails, you've lost nothing.

~200 dvd's is annoying to burn.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: EarthwormJim

Originally posted by: myocardia
Welcome to anandtech. My personal thoughts on hard drives failing are that you should always have hard copies (CD's or DVD's) of any data that's importnt to you. Then, it doesn't matter what the diagnostic software thinks. If/when the HD fails, you've lost nothing.

~200 dvd's is annoying to burn.

Which is more annoying, burning 200 DVD's, or losing 200 DVD's worth of irreplaceable data?

 

[St0ry]

Well my current system is pretty old. P4 2.6ghz, Asus pe800 or something like that. I'm currently in the process of building a new computer so maybe I'll run Seatools on the drives again with the new set-up and see the SMART results.

Btw, I was looking at my new mobo today, the Gigabyte DS3L and saw that it comes with only 2 SATA cables while the mobo supports 4 SATA devices, do I need to buy more SATA cables separately or something? And are right angle SATA connectors any different from straight ones?

Thanks