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Your hard disk is going to fail, software

P

pekingu

n00b
Joined
Aug 17, 2006
Messages
25
I have found info about software called hddlifehttp://www.hddlife.com/, it supposedly reads smart data and warns you when your hard drive is reaching a total failure point. Is this posible. I dont want to put a hard drive eating dust on a shelf because it was supposed to fail in a short time without a good reason, although i prefer that to lose the data it contains.

i have had a look at the stiky http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=485217and didnt find any mention of this software, maybe it is a function included in more well known software pieces like partition magic or something, i dont know because i dont use any.
 
I wouldn't trust software to make my final decision. You can use the software as a warning and back your information up on the "failing" drive.
 
I bet all its doing is reading the S.M.A.R.T. info off the drives. Nothing special, lots of programs can do that.
 
How should the SMART data be interpreted? At what point should I assume the hard drive is as good as unusable?
 
Someone correct me if I'm wrong..
Not every hd and controller manufacturer is on the same page when it comes to SMART.. And since different manufacturers use different value limits or specs for their drives, usually the manufacturers software should be used to determine if a value is within that particular drives safety limits..

I have a drive in my system right now that has been giving me a low head height error for the last 6 months.. It is just under the saftey limit, so I receive a SMART error, however the value has not changed for the last 6 months.. I no longer trust the drive for anything important, but, obviously imminent failure was not at hand when I first started to get the warning.. It seems the trends in certain SMART values and which SMART values are actually triggering the warning, are more important in figuring out if the drive is actually bad or how long you have before it goes bad, than the fact that you are getting a SMART warning..

But if you are getting SMART errors it is very likely that the drive is going to fail sooner rather than later.. But figuring out how much time you actually have is a bitch..

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/qual/featuresSMART.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitoring,_Analysis,_and_Reporting_Technology
 
SMART can only detect certain types of failure.
I enable SMART in the computers CMOS and leave it at that but GORANKARs advice is good.
I look for a lot of signs of failure but I am a hardware engineer.

When a SMART error occurs, back up the data on that drive immediately as it could fail at any moment.
 
google's drive study (see here) says that it is rare of SMART to warn of an imminent drive failure. Bad drives can give good SMART values. Bad SMART values on the other hand usually indicate a broken drive.
 
drizzt81 said:
google's drive study (see here) says that it is rare of SMART to warn of an imminent drive failure. Bad drives can give good SMART values. Bad SMART values on the other hand usually indicate a broken drive.
Click to expand...

Yep I agree with that.
 
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