Should we pre-emptively retire old hard drives?

[40hz]

^ Agree with Mouser. That's 140 degrees F in my country. Way too hot for long term reliability. Get better fans or take something out of the case.

Regarding your Current Pending Sector Count alert - yeah, that's not good:

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Event Codes: SMART+197
Attribute ID: 197 (0xC5)

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Hard drives, supporting this attribute

Samsung, Seagate, IBM (Hitachi), Fujitsu, Maxtor, Western Digital

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Description

Current Pending Sector Count S.M.A.R.T. parameter is a critical parameter and indicates the current count of unstable sectors (waiting for remapping). The raw value of this attribute indicates the total number of sectors waiting for remapping. Later, when some of these sectors are read successfully, the value is decreased. If errors still occur when reading some sector, the hard drive will try to restore the data, transfer it to the reserved disk area (spare area) and mark this sector as remapped.

Please also consult your machines's or hard disks documentation.

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Recommendations

This is a critical parameter. Degradation of this parameter may indicate imminent drive failure. Urgent data backup and hardware replacement is recommended.

Think it's time to retire that drive and also seriously look into doing something about case heat if the new drive also ends up seeing temperatures in that range.

Luck!

[mouser]

CAN A FAN BREAK DOWN WITHOUT THE USER BEING NOTIFIED?

sure can.  i've lost a cpu when the motherboard fan failed.

there are tools to check fan speeds that should/might be able to tell you which fans are running and at what speeds.

[tomos]

CAN A FAN BREAK DOWN WITHOUT THE USER BEING NOTIFIED?

sure can.  i've lost a cpu when the motherboard fan failed.

there are tools to check fan speeds that should/might be able to tell you which fans are running and at what speeds.

-mouser (August 10, 2012, 08:54 AM)

I've used SpeedFan in the past

[MilesAhead]

Also there's a free program HWMonitor that shows fan speeds and other hw info. It's been awhile since I downloaded it.  But my recollection is there's no setup needed. It should show fan speed for supported systems out of the box.

[kyrathaba]

I've used SpeedFan in the past

Anyone know if SpeedFan works as a stealthy (i.e., no registry dependencies) portable app?

[40hz]

I've used SpeedFan in the past

Anyone know if SpeedFan works as a stealthy (i.e., no registry dependencies) portable app?

-kyrathaba (August 15, 2012, 07:49 PM)

Supposedly some previous versions used to also be available in a portable version. The most current version doesn't last I heard.

[4wd]

Using RegShot, OpenHardwareMonitor doesn't appear to store anything in registry and HWiNFO, (portable version), stores some sensor parameters in the registry but will work whether they are there or not, (just rescans the next time it's run).

OpenHardwareMonitor:
Should we pre-emptively retire old hard drives?

HWiNFO:
Should we pre-emptively retire old hard drives?

HWiNFO you can choose what sensors to display, OHM you can't but you can collapse the ones you're not interested in.

[kyrathaba]

Thanks for the links. Added OHM to my pendrive suite.

[4wd]

Forgot to mention OHM requires .NET 2+ so that might cut down on it's usefulness as a portable monitor.

[mouser]

Related discussions on this thread.

[MilesAhead]

Hmmm, just this Friday the 13th I was awakened by a man in coveralls who told me my Laptop had to be serviced immediately since his records indicated it's HD failed 21 minutes from now. The strange thing was, he bore a striking resemblance to Tom Cruise.  He showed me the print-out.  It was beautiful, muti-colored and had several types of charts.  The good news was he could quote me an exact figure for parts and labor since he already knew what his diagnosis would show.

Of course I gave him the go ahead.  

[TaoPhoenix]

Re this thread, rather than "pre-emptively kill" (which means guessing) my HD, I'd guess I'd rather just have a "silent backup" available that maybe only needs a quick bios switch to make "bootable live". Because we put a bit of work to get quality parts in my comp. Why "pre-emptively" lose 3 years of service just from one random article?