StarDestroyer.Net BBS

OK, so I get Windows 7 telling me that my hard drive is about to die and advising me to back up my files. Intrigued since I've not been having any particular issues with my hard drive of late, I busted out SeaTools. SMART test was a failure, although the "generic short" test was a pass. Since it didn't tell me anything more than a simple failure of the SMART test, I dowloaded HDDScan which told me more, see below:



I've had this computer for just over a year now. I hope this isn't anything serious, but if it is I may have to invest in a new hard drive.

Should I be worried?

Here is what a Google research paper has to say about reallocation sectors:

Reallocation Counts
When the drive’s logic believes that a sector is damaged (typically as a result of recurring soft errors or a hard error) it can remap the faulty sector number to a new physical sector drawn from a pool of spares. Reallocation counts reflect the number of times this has happened, and is seen as an indication of drive surface wear.

Your hard drive is out of spare sectors, so you will start losing data soon. You should back up the drive and replace it.

Really? What a load of bollocks. I'm pretty sure I got a few good years' service out of the HDD on my old computer before it died, and up until that point I don't recall having any particular issues with missing or corrupted files (although I do remember there being a degradation of the machine's overall performance). Am I misremembering things, or is it standard practice these days to make hard drives out of crap and rubbish?

Google tells me that I can get a decent hard drive for under £50, but since I lack the ability to buy things online I'm a little dubious of that price being matched at a bricks-and-mortar establishment. Any UK-based members here got any tips?

Don't read too much into it. There's a lot of different ways for a drive to fail, and bad luck with drive life hits everyone eventually.

Indeed. Just copy your data off the drive as soon as possible and then take it on the chin. You don't exactly have any options in that regard.

Most HDs aren't rubbish, but every now and then there are some that start degrading pretty fast. I've seen ten year old drives that were fine and two month old ones that were going to shit already, but mostly it's older drives that develop problems.

Thanks for the input, everyone. I'll be checking the disk again early next week, to try and gauge how rapidly things are deteriorating. I just hope I can find somewhere to store the backup until I get a new HDD.

An backup drive ought to set you back between about £60-80 for 320GB and £100 for a terabyte in PC World or Curry's. An internal one might be slightly cheaper, but won't help you very much if something really catastrophic like a power surge happens.

And how come you can't buy online, by the way? You certainly don't post like you're under 18.

PC World has 500 gig SATA drives for sixty five quid & terabyte for eighty quid, slightly more than you could get one online but not by that much.