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After drive started to freeze up, i them plugged another drive with ubuntu to see SMART data using disk utility.

Now i read that "Disk is healthy". Now i'm not familiar with SMART parameters, but looking at them, there are some insane high numbers and each time i press refresh, they grow.

These 3 parameters are high as seen in picture (its really ubuntu, just with mac theme):

  • Read error rate
  • Seek error rate
  • Hardware ECC recovered

Should i conclude that the drive has failed? Or may there be problem in controller or cable, motherbord? This is an PATA drive.

Also when testing for bad blocks, the test stops ~80%, but it doesn't indicate that any bad block is found.

Umm, i checked the ubuntu-drive (which performs good), and those same numbers are high (and growing) for that drive also, but it is connected to SATA controller.

Janis Veinbergs
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    If you are having *any* sort of issues with a hard drive, now would be a perfect time to make sure you have backups of any important data on that drive. The issues might be fixable, or your drive could die tomorrow. – devicenull Apr 06 '11 at 02:30

1 Answers1

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The tests are done by the drive on the drive so your interface to the PC is irrelevant.

These are recoverable errors probably due to overheating by the looks of it. The normalized (current rating) and worst go from 100 good to 0 bad. For those 3 items the value will always go up but it is the rate that is important. You can see that these are currently higher than the worst (which means it is better now than it was). The thresholds are set by the manufacturer so are a reliable indication of whether it is a problem or not, as you can see these are good.

I think if you try to improve your cooling around the drive you will see your normalized go up, your values climb less rapidly and performance should improve.

JamesRyan
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