Dieing hard drive maybe I dunno

[Hayamaneko]

So a few weeks ago I was having an issue where my desktop's BIOS wasn't saving the boot order settings. In an attempt to fix it I was unplugging and plugging back in some hard drive since they wouldn't be detected. Eventually I spark occured when plugging back in one of the hard drives and it caused the whole computer to shut down. After booting it back up the 1TB SATA drive would not get noticed by the BIOS and I feared I had either damaged the motherboard or the hard drive. I took it to a repair place and they eventually told me that the 1TB SATA drive failed to pass the SMART test and it was close to dieing (though I could still retrieve data off it). Once I took it back home and started messing around with my computer I noticed that the 1TB seemed fine and passed the SMART test

tl;dr: I wand to be absolutely sure that the 1TB hard drive isn't dieing so is their some way to test that out before I start using it again? I ran test in Seatools and it passed them so I am not sure what I should be looking for

[Drkz]

http://crystalmark.info/software/Cry...o/index-e.html

Your mileage will vary and the smart test isn't really reliable. A close to dead harddrive will start giving you really slow write speeds and you'll start getting a lot of errors. Its officially dead when you can't copy anything anymore. It tends to vary. Some people have had drives in the red from crystal and they still use it like its fine. Best bet is to back everything up and maybe use is a backup of a backup if your really worried.

[Hayamaneko]

Originally Posted by Drkz

http://crystalmark.info/software/Cry...o/index-e.html

Your mileage will vary and the smart test isn't really reliable. A close to dead harddrive will start giving you really slow write speeds and you'll start getting a lot of errors. Its officially dead when you can't copy anything anymore. It tends to vary. Some people have had drives in the red from crystal and they still use it like its fine. Best bet is to back everything up and maybe use is a backup of a backup if your really worried.

Not really sure what I should be looking for with that program. For the health status of the drive I get "Caution" and that "current pending sector count" is yellow

[Drkz]

Originally Posted by Hayamaneko

Not really sure what I should be looking for with that program. For the health status of the drive I get "Caution" and that "current pending sector count" is yellow

It means the cycllic errors have reached a margin in which your drive can no longer ignore. Basically you have damaged sectors and you can't fix it with any program. This is the tricky part. You can still use the drive, but it has a chance to die at anytime as well so your best bet is to not save anything important on it that you won't mind losing. But for sure you'll see a significant slow down in write speed. You'll probably get somewhere between 15-24mb write speed. I'd say back all your files and than reformat the drive and try running a chkdisk. It might make it somewhat more healthier.