laptop hard drives

[jaz]

was on another forum and saw this

My laptop (HP Compaq) is showing a black screen that says roughly that I
should back up my data because the hard disk 2 maybe failing


never had a h-d fail. do they give warning before they do crash?



there was no answer on the other forum.

thanks

 

[Dallas]

Sometimes if you are luck you do get subtle warnings. Most of the time your
drive will die without any warning. Defenately back up your data. At this
point you may want to put the drive in the freezer for couple of hours as
the cold will hard the platters and preserve your data. I know this sounds
crazy but we do it at work all the time to save data. Buy a hard drive
enlosure if you do not already have one for laptop drives then put the drive
in it when you are ready and back the data up. Do a diagnostic on the drive
get the error codes. Then if the hard drive is under warranty get it
replaced. This is my recommendation.

 

[BillW50]

In jaz typed on Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:39:02 -0700:

was on another forum and saw this

My laptop (HP Compaq) is showing a black screen that says roughly
that I should back up my data because the hard disk 2 maybe failing

never had a h-d fail. do they give warning before they do crash?

there was no answer on the other forum.

thanks

I had a couple brand new drives fail in days. And yes, they can take awhile
to fail or they can just suddenly quit. One of the new drives that failed on
me I kept it going for about 7 months. And then the other new one, I shut it
down one day and turned it on the next and there was nothing. Completely
dead!

Now on the other hand, besides the above. Hard drives are sensitive towards
bumps and shock. Desktop machines don't get moved around much so they
usually don't suffer from this. But laptops can be bounced around while they
are running and causes the head to crash into the platter. The hard drive
can take this abuse some, but it can an early death.

That is why SSD (solid state drives) in laptops are a big plus for such an
enviroment. For example, the Asus EEE PC uses them and you can bounce it all
day and night and there is no head and platter to crash. So that will never
cause it to fail.

--
Bill
Gateway Celeron M 370 (1.5GHZ)
MX6124 (laptop) w/2GB
Windows XP Home SP2 (120GB HD)
Intel(r) 910GML (64MB shared)

 

[Patrick Keenan]

was on another forum and saw this

My laptop (HP Compaq) is showing a black screen that says roughly that I
should back up my data because the hard disk 2 maybe failing


never had a h-d fail. do they give warning before they do crash?

This is the SMART feature, and there is absolutely no benefit in doubting
what it tells you.

At this point, the drive has a limited number of hours of operation left.
Don't waste them by running it or trying to fix it; all you should do is
recover your data.

Remove the drive, get a new one of the same connector type (IDE or SATA),
clone the old one to the new one. This should take about an hour unless the
drive really is failing. Install the new one and proceed.

If the drive is in poor shape, you'll have to reinstall or restore the OS
to the new hard disk, install your apps, then attach your old drive and
copy your data over as quickly as possible.

HTH
-pk

 

[Patrick Keenan]

Sometimes if you are luck you do get subtle warnings. Most of the time
your
drive will die without any warning. Defenately back up your data. At this
point you may want to put the drive in the freezer for couple of hours as
the cold will hard the platters and preserve your data. I know this sounds
crazy but we do it at work all the time to save data. Buy a hard drive
enlosure if you do not already have one for laptop drives then put the
drive
in it when you are ready and back the data up. Do a diagnostic on the
drive
get the error codes. Then if the hard drive is under warranty get it
replaced. This is my recommendation.

One comment about warranty replacements - yes if the warranty applies you
should exercise it but data must be backed up FIRST as the manufacturer will
show no respect to it. Once you send that drive back, whatever is on it is
lost to you.

-pk

 

[BillW50]

In Patrick Keenan typed on Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:20:47 -0400:

This is the SMART feature, and there is absolutely no benefit in
doubting what it tells you...

SMART can only predict 30% of failures. So I would put 70% of a doubt.

https://calomel.org/smart_hd_status.html

 

[John John (MVP)]

No doubt anyone ignoring SMART warnings has to accept the possibility of
losing all the data on the disk. Some people know this and willingly
accept that possibility, the drive doesn't contain anything of value.
The others are simply not the sharpest tool in the shed...

John

 

[Navigator]

This is the SMART feature, and there is absolutely no benefit in doubting
what it tells you.

At this point, the drive has a limited number of hours of operation left.
Don't waste them by running it or trying to fix it; all you should do is
recover your data.

Remove the drive, get a new one of the same connector type (IDE or SATA),
clone the old one to the new one. This should take about an hour unless the
drive really is failing. Install the new one and proceed.

If the drive is in poor shape, you'll have to reinstall or restore the OS
to the new hard disk, install your apps, then attach your old drive and
copy your data over as quickly as possible.

HTH
-pk

Having read that, I'll play the flip side of the coin: I've seen tons
of Hard Drives that indicate a failure in SMART yet were still running
months later. It's a warning but not a completely accurate one. It's
like a highway sign warning you to slow down going around a curve:
it's OK to play it safe and slow down (aka replace the drive) but you
are usually fine holding the same speed going round the curve (not
replacing the drive).

Ultimately the choice is up to you. If you back up your data
regularly a HD replacement is not a big deal anyway. I say run it
until it dies.

 

[Patrick Keenan]

In Patrick Keenan typed on Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:20:47 -0400:

SMART can only predict 30% of failures. So I would put 70% of a doubt.

I'm not sure you thought this through.

What you appear to be saying is that there's 70% chance that the SMART
features *missed* errors, not a 30% chance that it's reporting something as
error that isn't one.

Which really means that if it's reported an error, there is a significantly
higher probablity of it being a real, serious error and that the drive is
much closer to failure.

A black screen and system halt is a good sign that the drive should be
replaced. And with half-terabyte drives approaching $60, where's the
benefit to wasting time and losing data?

The only valid reason to ignore the SMART errors is to watch what happens as
a drive fails. Which is usually a pretty short show, and if the data on it
was of value you're going to pay much more to a service bureau to open the
drive and hook it up to their controllers to scrape the data off.

https://calomel.org/smart_hd_status.html

Yeah, and if you actually read that, it doesn't say that there is any
benefit in ignoring SMART errors.

HTH
-pk

 

[BillW50]

In John John (MVP) typed on Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:50:51 -0300:

No doubt anyone ignoring SMART warnings has to accept the possibility
of losing all the data on the disk. Some people know this and
willingly accept that possibility, the drive doesn't contain anything
of value. The others are simply not the sharpest tool in the shed...

Then again John I pushed a hard drive that started acting up brand new
without a warrantee for over 7 months. I never lost a thing. I also bought a
hard drive back in '91 and it failed within a week. I returned it and the
one I got back had a label on it and it said prototype and it had bad
sectors on it. Worse the seals were all broken.

I complained of course and the tech asked me if there was more bad sectors
after I got it? And I said no. He said then don't worry about it. I didn't
like that answer but I was going to nail him if it got worse. And today that
same drive still works fine. That is 17 years later.

 

[John John (MVP)]

Then again John I pushed a hard drive that started acting up brand new
without a warrantee for over 7 months. I never lost a thing. I also bought a
hard drive back in '91 and it failed within a week. I returned it and the
one I got back had a label on it and it said prototype and it had bad
sectors on it. Worse the seals were all broken.

I complained of course and the tech asked me if there was more bad sectors
after I got it? And I said no. He said then don't worry about it. I didn't
like that answer but I was going to nail him if it got worse. And today that
same drive still works fine. That is 17 years later.

Some people are diagnosed with terminal illnesses and given a short time
to live, then their illness goes into remission and they live to an old
age, or their physician made an incorrect diagnosis. But an
overwhelming number of patients die within the predicted time frame.

SMART is not a 100% accurate prediction but it is a warning that trouble
may lay ahead. While you had one drive last 17 years after it gave you
a SMART error the flip side of the coin is that for every drive that
lasts 17 years tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of drives do
not last more than a year. On kiosk computers in coffer shops or on toy
computers where nothing of any value is stored one may chose to ignore
the errors and see how long the drive lives, on any machine that is
important for work or daily life or that is used to work with important
data ignoring the error is simply not a very smart thing to do! People
may read your posts and think that they can reasonably safely ignore
SMART warnings, they may misunderstand your post as advice given and it
may (or will) become bad advice that they wish they hadn't followed.

John

 

[John John (MVP)]

Some people are diagnosed with terminal illnesses and given a short time
to live, then their illness goes into remission and they live to an old
age, or their physician made an incorrect diagnosis. But an
overwhelming number of patients die within the predicted time frame.

SMART is not a 100% accurate prediction but it is a warning that trouble
may lay ahead. While you had one drive last 17 years after it gave you
a SMART error the flip side of the coin is that for every drive that
lasts 17 years tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of drives do
not last more than a year. On kiosk computers in coffer shops or on toy
computers where nothing of any value is stored one may chose to ignore
the errors and see how long the drive lives, on any machine that is
important for work or daily life or that is used to work with important
data ignoring the error is simply not a very smart thing to do! People
may read your posts and think that they can reasonably safely ignore
SMART warnings, they may misunderstand your post as advice given and it
may (or will) become bad advice that they wish they hadn't followed.

PS: Who in the heck would use a 17 year old hard drive? Today that
would make it a drive from circa 1991, how big would that drive be? A
couple hundred MBs? What use would that be today? 17 years from now
Windows will probably need 54 terabytes of disk space to install and
today's 500 GB drives will be puny!

John

 

[BillW50]

In Patrick Keenan typed on Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:37:03 -0400:

I'm not sure you thought this through.

What you appear to be saying is that there's 70% chance that the SMART
features *missed* errors, not a 30% chance that it's reporting
something as error that isn't one.

Which really means that if it's reported an error, there is a
significantly higher probablity of it being a real, serious error and
that the drive is much closer to failure.

A black screen and system halt is a good sign that the drive should be
replaced. And with half-terabyte drives approaching $60, where's
the benefit to wasting time and losing data?

The only valid reason to ignore the SMART errors is to watch what
happens as a drive fails. Which is usually a pretty short show, and
if the data on it was of value you're going to pay much more to a
service bureau to open the drive and hook it up to their controllers
to scrape the data off.

Yeah, and if you actually read that, it doesn't say that there is any
benefit in ignoring SMART errors.

No I am taking about both sides of the coin. SMART can say backup now and
get rid of that drive and the cases where the drive fails and SMART said
until the last working moments that everything is fine.

You seem to be concern with SMART saying the drive is going to go. Well that
isn't 100% reliable either. And there are many cases where SMART says the
drive is going to fail and it doesn't.

 

[BillW50]

In John John (MVP) typed on Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:40:57 -0300:

Some people are diagnosed with terminal illnesses and given a short
time to live, then their illness goes into remission and they live to
an old age, or their physician made an incorrect diagnosis. But an
overwhelming number of patients die within the predicted time frame.

This maybe so for those that does believe they would die. Those that doesn't
believe so have far much better odds.

SMART is not a 100% accurate prediction but it is a warning that
trouble may lay ahead. While you had one drive last 17 years after
it gave you a SMART error the flip side of the coin is that for every
drive that lasts 17 years tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands
of drives do not last more than a year. On kiosk computers in coffer
shops or on toy computers where nothing of any value is stored one
may chose to ignore the errors and see how long the drive lives, on
any machine that is important for work or daily life or that is used
to work with important data ignoring the error is simply not a very
smart thing to do! People may read your posts and think that they
can reasonably safely ignore SMART warnings, they may misunderstand
your post as advice given and it may (or will) become bad advice that
they wish they hadn't followed.

First of all. there was no SMART technology 17 years ago and I was just
going by there was bad sectors that I didn't like. Sure I doubted the wisdom
of the tech (the seal was broken and had bad sectors remember) and I was an
engineer and I didn't like it. But it turned out the tech was right and I
was wrong.

I am not saying that SMART warning are not wrong. I am just saying take them
with a grain of salt. They could be right or they could be wrong. According
to Google (who has 100,000 drives), they are right about 30% of the time.

 

[BillW50]

In John John (MVP) typed on Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:56:39 -0300:

PS: Who in the heck would use a 17 year old hard drive?

Today I only fire it up to see if it still works.

Today that would make it a drive from circa 1991, how big would that drive
be? A
couple hundred MBs? What use would that be today?

It is a 20MB HD and I used for for DOS programs a lot. Yes I did buy it in
'91. I didn't touch Windows until 1993 with Windows 3.1.

17 years from now Windows will probably need 54 terabytes of disk space to
install and today's 500 GB drives will be puny!

Good for me, since I like to record from my my TV card. The lowest speed
that I still like is one GB per hour in MPEG format.

 

[John John (MVP)]

I am not saying that SMART warning are not wrong. I am just saying take them
with a grain of salt. They could be right or they could be wrong. According
to Google (who has 100,000 drives), they are right about 30% of the time.

I think you misread that article that you pointed us to. This is what I
read there:

"Mechanical failures, which are usually predictable failures, account
for 60 percent of drive failure. The purpose of S.M.A.R.T. is to warn a
user or system administrator of impending drive failure while time
remains to take preventative action such as copying the data to a
replacement device. Approximately 30% of failures can be predicted by
S.M.A.R.T."

It doesn't say that S.M.A.R.T. is only right 30% of the time, it says
that S.M.A.R.T. can detect about 30% of failures before they happen, or
that it can't detect the other 70% of failures, or that 70% of failures
occur without S.M.A.R.T. warning. There is a big difference in what is
said there and what you say. Others can read the reference material you
gave us and I think they will see it the same way I see it. As for your
comment that Google claims that S.M.A.R.T. is only right 30% of the
time, there again nowheres in the material that you present does it say
that. Here is what it says about the 100,000 drives at Google:

"Work at Google on over 100,000 drives has shown little overall
predictive value of S.M.A.R.T. status as a whole, but that certain
sub-categories of information S.M.A.R.T. implementations might track do
correlate with actual failure rates - specifically that following the
first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days
than drives with no such errors and first errors in reallocations,
offline reallocations, and probational counts are also strongly
correlated to higher failure probabilities."

There again, it doesn't say that S.M.A.R.T. is only right 30% of the
time, quite to the contrary it says that drives are 39 times more likely
to fail after receiving S.M.A.R.T. errors! All that the research or
work at Google says is that S.M.A.R.T. is of limited value in detecting
eminent failures, in other words drives often fail without any
S.M.A.R.T. errors, nowhere does it say that only 30% of drives with
S.M.A.R.T. errors fail, to the contrary it says that most fail within 60
days.

John

 

[BillW50]

In John John (MVP) typed on Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:43:33 -0300:

I think you misread that article that you pointed us to. This is
what I read there:

"Mechanical failures, which are usually predictable failures, account
for 60 percent of drive failure. The purpose of S.M.A.R.T. is to warn
a user or system administrator of impending drive failure while time
remains to take preventative action such as copying the data to a
replacement device. Approximately 30% of failures can be predicted by
S.M.A.R.T."

It doesn't say that S.M.A.R.T. is only right 30% of the time, it says
that S.M.A.R.T. can detect about 30% of failures before they happen,
or that it can't detect the other 70% of failures, or that 70% of
failures occur without S.M.A.R.T. warning. There is a big difference
in what is said there and what you say. Others can read the
reference material you gave us and I think they will see it the same
way I see it. As for your comment that Google claims that S.M.A.R.T.
is only right 30% of the time, there again nowheres in the material
that you present does it say that. Here is what it says about the
100,000 drives at Google:
"Work at Google on over 100,000 drives has shown little overall
predictive value of S.M.A.R.T. status as a whole, but that certain
sub-categories of information S.M.A.R.T. implementations might track
do correlate with actual failure rates - specifically that following
the first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within
60 days than drives with no such errors and first errors in
reallocations, offline reallocations, and probational counts are also
strongly correlated to higher failure probabilities."

There again, it doesn't say that S.M.A.R.T. is only right 30% of the
time, quite to the contrary it says that drives are 39 times more
likely to fail after receiving S.M.A.R.T. errors! All that the
research or work at Google says is that S.M.A.R.T. is of limited
value in detecting eminent failures, in other words drives often fail
without any S.M.A.R.T. errors, nowhere does it say that only 30% of
drives with S.M.A.R.T. errors fail, to the contrary it says that most
fail within 60 days.

Look John! The exact numbers doesn't really matter. What really matters is
if SMART says your drive is going fail. Does that mean it will? No! It means
30% or whatever it will. But it means nothing towards your drive personally.
As I don't care if it is 99% correct as I might be in the 1% that it isn't
so. And that is the point that I am trying to make.

Averages is nice to know, but they are *totally* useless when it comes to
the individual. The point being where every case SMART was right, I can
match another case where it was wrong. Being so, it is realy not that
useful.

 

[John John (MVP)]

Look John! The exact numbers doesn't really matter. What really matters is
if SMART says your drive is going fail. Does that mean it will? No! It means
30% or whatever it will.

Obviously you didn't read the article you pointed us to or if you read
it you completely misunderstood what the article says! That notion of
yours that S.M.A.R.T. is only right 30% of the time is just that, a
notion. That is just plain and simply something that you made up to
support your argument.

But it means nothing towards your drive personally.
As I don't care if it is 99% correct as I might be in the 1% that it isn't
so. And that is the point that I am trying to make.

No one said that S.M.A.R.T was 100% accurate, you on the other hand are
suggesting that S.M.A.R.T. errors are wrong 70% of the time, that 70% of
drives reporting S.M.A.R.T. errors have nothing wrong with them, that is
not true, that is nothing more than a fabrication on your part.

Averages is nice to know, but they are *totally* useless when it comes to
the individual. The point being where every case SMART was right, I can
match another case where it was wrong. Being so, it is realy not that
useful.

That is simply not true! You are spreading bad advice, rather than
ignoring S.M.A.R.T. errors users should instead ignore your bad advice
and made up statistics!

John