Failing Hard Drive??

[RJack]

Cools thanks for the advice I'll try and pick up one of these in Maplins or PC World tomorrow

SEAGATE Barracuda Internal 3.5" SATA Hard Drive - 1TB 7200 rpm

[Samdy Gray]

Those stats don't necessarily mean the drive is failing. You only have read errors. It could be as simple as a dodgy SATA cable or it could be the SATA controller on the motherboard.

I've got exactly the same drive in my NAS and it showed very similar SMART errors. I backed up the drive, zero filled it and stuck it in another machine and it's fine now.

[Barry Scott]

I always replace a drive the moment I hear that unmistakeable ticking of doom. It almost makes me paranoid because the moment I hear it I get jittery and don't do anything other than put it in the bin.

I remember on the IBM (pre-Hitachi) Deskstars (which I lost many of) they used to have a format utility that "repaired" damaged sectors and did what it called a low-level format. It made the drive work again for about a month then you either formatted/repaired again or bought a new one. It was painful and made me refuse to ever go near those drives again.

I'd love to move onto an SSD and I'm patiently waiting for the 480GB OCZ Vertex 3's to become cheaper than the price of a smallholding.

[Batch]

I remember on the IBM (pre-Hitachi) Deskstars (which I lost many of) they used to have a format utility that "repaired" damaged sectors and did what it called a low-level format. It made the drive work again for about a month then you either formatted/repaired again or bought a new one. It was painful and made me refuse to ever go near those drives again.

I used to have an IBM Deathstar. Lasted not too long..tick tick tick....bin

[stfcinbmth]

HDD Regenerator is a pretty handy tool for repairing damaged sectors. You can find it around version 10.00 of Hiren's Boot CD

Not a cure tho, look at replacing asap

[RJack]

Thanks all i replaced the Sata Cable but was still having problems so i bought a Hitachi Deskstar 1TB 7200RPM.  I'm going to Zero fill the Samsung HDD to see if i can fix it then use it as a secondary HDD if it does

[suttonred]

Will sound stupid, but if you have a dodgy drive stick it in the fridge for 24 hours and then ghost it. It works 90% of the time.

[Huwwy]

I clicked on here by mistake. Mightly impressed with all the tech lingo, but surely you all just secretly turn it off at the plug and hope for the best like the rest of us?