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The only way to know for sure about impending drive failures is to watch the S.M.A.R.T. data from smartctl.

I've had several Maxtor drives just fall over and die even when SMART thinks everything is okay.


There is nothing contradictory between those two statements.

Drives can (and do and have) suddenly stop working without any signs of "impending failure", and there's really nothing anyone (other than the manufacturer) can do about it.

Recent example being all of those flawed chips that circulated in laptop (and some desktop) drives from (I think) 2001 - 2003 or so. Just a bad batch of chips that would internally fail at some random point early in their intended lifespan. Really bit IBM quite hard, as well as some other makers.

Most recently here, I have had a nice huge 300GB Maxtor drive develop a few bad sectors. Did I toss it? Of course not, but I did run a full S.M.A.R.T. "long" test (sector scan) on it after repairing the bad sectors. The drive is fine now.

In this case, the real culprit was the USB2 enclosure it was in, which seemed to be developing some kind of issues whereby it was randomly reseting the drive mid-use, which can corrupt sectors when done in the middle of a write operation. So I've tossed the $50 enclosure in favour of a new one, and kept the rather expensive (for its time) drive.

On the other hand, I once had a 80GB notebook drive here that developed bad sectors. After repairing them, it was put back into (less critical) use, and developed more bad sectors. So I belatedly checked out the S.M.A.R.T. stuff and discovered the drive even "knew" it wasn't healthy, and it then got sent off for replacement under warranty. The one they sent back in return is still working fine.

Cheers


Edited by mlord (11/06/2005 16:49)