A few hard drive questions

[Jon R.]

I'm Googling and searching other forums, but i'm not really keen about filling out another spam request form to ask this anywhere else. Bear with it, please.

So, i'm trodding along a few days ago and i hear this nice click, and my HD light goes solid and everything freezes up for a while before the explorer window for the drive comes up. No error box, but this doesn't bode well. While my proficiency with a computer isn't encyclopaedic, i know that few components make this sound, and that the ones that do genreally aren't supposed to. So, in the time it takes me to yell "SHIT", i power down and disconnect it. The first question would be: is there any circumstance at all where a HD would do this and NOT be on its way out? It's a Maxtor 40 gig, 5200 RPM drive. I'm thinking that it could be some weirdness with it spinning up, but i've never had it happen like that before and i'm not inclined to bet 20 gigs of irreplacable data on it. Could it at all be because of heat?

Second, what is this SMART crap? When and where does it start telling you that things are going south? I've got it enabled in BIOS, but have no additional SMART software installed in windows.

Third, i'm suspecting that i'll be in the market for a new HD, so i'm wondering what the general concensus here is about the reliability of the different brands. I'd prefer it the comments were made on models less than 2 years old, as i'm starting to notice a lot more complaints about 40+ gigers failing more than their predecessors, and i'm sort of inclined to take a bit of stock in it due to the 3 gig Fujitsu that's keeping my system afloat. The obligatory "I've got this, works for me" is fair game here. SATA is nice, but i'd prefer to stick with IDE for now.

[Yuki Katase]

1) During all my years of computer use and tech support, I've never heard of an instance where a clicking hard drive doesn't require drive replacement. With regards to heat, a quick glance at the Seagate website tells me that hard drives should be able to handle temperatures up to 131° F (55° C) - I think if the inside of your PC case ever got that hot, your CPU would have turned into a puddle of silicon-enriched goo.

2)

"S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a diagnostic method originally developed by I.B.M. for their mainframe drives to give advanced warning of drive failures. [...] Today all major hard disk drive manufacturers support S.M.A.R.T., including IBM, Western Digital, Quantum, Seagate, and Fujitsu."

http://www.belarc.com/Drive/smart.html

FWIW I've never utilised the SMART capabilities of any hard drives, so I have no idea about its effectiveness.

3) I haven't had any problems with Seagate IDEs and SATAs nor Maxtor IDEs. However it seems to me that Maxtor IDEs have a significantly louder hard drive spin-up/spin-down sound.

These days it seems like that if you want a reliable hard drive, you should go for 120GB or less but this is anecdotal evidence AFAIK.

[nutsak]

I'm pretty sure than S.M.A.R.T is actually pretty effective , but I'm pretty sure it has a performance hit (as do all nice things) . .that CLICK you heard.. I get that too on my 13 Gig Quantum Fireball (which is really sad - cuz it's over 4 years old -and was in my first PC I built myself) ..
It usually signifies death - but it may not be iminant ... you might get away with using it for some time yet .. just nough time in fact to go get another HDD and back up all of your data ... heck mines been doing this for a long time now .. like 3 months , and, ( toucnh wood ) it hasn't died yet..

Good luck.

(oh, and if it does die - there are some companies that can get the data off it still ... so don't do what I did and hammer and chisel it just for fun )

[Yuki Katase]

(oh, and if it does die - there are some companies that can get the data off it still

Except that said companies usually charge like a wounded bull for the priviledge.

[Jack]

I agree with the others that this most likely does signify the death-cry of your harddrive. But I have experienced that type of click when the power source becomes insufficient to power the drive.

Have you added hardware to your system? It's a distant possibility that your power supply has reached its twilight years, as well.

Back up everything you don't want to lose, though. Chances are your harddrive is clicking as its spirit spirals closer to the trash can.

[Lunch of Kong]

hard drives should be able to handle temperatures up to 131° F (55° C) - I think if the inside of your PC case ever got that hot, your CPU would have turned into a puddle of silicon-enriched goo.

Hard drives generate their own heat. In a poorly-ventilated case, hard drive temperatures can easily exceed those limitations. If you experience discomfort when feeling the case of a hard drive, it is too hot; you should try to find a way to improve the ventilation.

[Lunch of Kong]

Making and using a RAID-1 mirror array for storing your data makes a lot of sense. HARD DRIVES WILL ALWAYS FAIL. A RAID-1 array is fault tolerant. Fault tolerance is the only way that you can weather a hard drive failure without the resulting loss of data and time spent in recovery.

You need a RAID PCI card or RAID-capable motherboard to make a RAID-1 mirror array, and it's worth the extra money you pay. There are death, taxes, and hard drive failures, and only one of those have to be fatal.



Here's the sad story that got me into RAID in the first place:

I had an IBM Deskstar in one of my computers that started to make clicking noises. I got worried, and bought a CD-R burner to make backups of my data. I powered off my computer, installed the CD-R burner, and powered the computer back on.

The hard drive chose that exact moment to fail.

[Case]

Here's the sad story that got me into RAID in the first place:

I had an IBM Deskstar in one of my computers that started to make clicking noises. I got worried, and bought a CD-R burner to make backups of my data. I powered off my computer, installed the CD-R burner, and powered the computer back on.

The hard drive chose that exact moment to fail.

*Ouch*

I have a similar story. My primary drive was starting to go south, so I bought another drive. The first drive failed in the *middle* of a partition clone. Arggh!

[Jon R.]

So that's probably that, then. The replies are much appreciated. Yes, my opinion of a RAID 1 setup shot up quite a bit because of this little event.

I'm pretty sure it's not the power supply, though i hadn't thought of that before. It's been big enough to properly power everything i've got in there (Not much. A GF3, a CDRW drive, a sound card, 2 hard drives, XP 1700+) for the past year, and it's newer than the failing drive. I'm not seeing any odd fluctuations from it.

Still hoping for a few brand recommendations. So far, i'm looking at
this and this.

[Yuki Katase]

Still hoping for a few brand recommendations. So far, i'm looking at
this and this.

Both are good options. It'd be down to either the toss of a coin or the desire to save six bucks. But with regards to gigabyte-to-dollar ratios you'd be better off getting 120GB or 160GB drives.

[Jon R.]

Alrighty. I decided to go with the Seagate 80 gig with 8 meg cache. FYI, Best Buy is currently running a deal where they're $109.99 and have a $50 and $10 MIR, if anyone's interested.

However, i've run into another slight snag. After copying files from the old drive to the new, i'm unable to do much to the recipient folder beyond look at it and think "Hey, it'd be really cool if i could open this folder". Mousing over it works fine, but even single clicking on it causes it to freeze and send explorer.exe up to 100% CPU usage. The folder will then open after a minute or 2 and going deeper into the directory causes no futher problems. It'll do the same thing all over again when trying to go back to the root dir by pressing the "back" button. Right-clicking and selecting Properties for the folder will do the same thing on exiting the Properties box. This is infinitely repeatable on my machine.

All other folders on the partition work as they should, and i've tried the deleting the reg key that causes XP to choke on corrupt .avis for some people. It's an NTFS partition, and seems to check out OK according to the XP Pro scan dealie. Any ideas what i'm missing?

Edit:
I seem to have resolved this, so i'll post it here as edification/amusement/justification for taking away my technology priveledges. A nice combination of typically useless proprietary HD software, Windows XP quirkiness, and naturally, a good dose of PEBCAK.

Long story short: With the old drive, i had 2 partitions, respectively lettered as d:\ containing my games and e:\ containing mostly MP3s. The Seagate software decided to give the Games and Media partitions the same letters, despite the fact that the drive previously bearing those letters wasn't connected at the time. I guess XP keeps track or something.

With the new drive, e:\ was acting like it was a media drive even though it was to contain my games, with "Music Tasks" showing up on the side panel and whatnot. I couldn't really do anything about this, as far as i found. In the offending folder (E:\Games) existed GTA3 and Vice City, both containing many, many shortcuts to MP3s that led to destinations on the now bum drive. The freezing evidently came from trying to link the shortcuts to god knows how many MP3s that were no longer there.

So, by now i'm thinking it's a good idea to mix alcohol with hardware troubleshooting. Then it hit me: I've got a partition for games. My old HD did too. I've got a partition for other media. So did my other HD. Hmmm.

By rearranging the new drive's partition drive letters to correspond to what they were before, i seem to have fixed things. In the end, the true complexity of the problem was made apparent to me several hours after the problem surfaced when i solved it while being piss-fucking-drunk.

This is the short version. The long version involves myriad tweaks of XP settings and a very liberal usage of the the phrase "God damn it". Happy birthday, Jesus.