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Seriousness of a “Smart” disk error. How long will it last?
My hard drive has a SMART trip, and while I have a rough understanding of this, I don't know the severity degree. I've backed up the drive and bought it's replacement, so no need to worry there.
My question simply comes down to this: is the hard drive now utterly useless and should just be tossed, or can I do something with it to make it useful? Are there any uses of a drive that has SMART tripped? I just hate to waste it if it still has purpose.
Thank you!
xtraorange
Posted 2012-11-30T00:12:12.227
Reputation: 187
1Run the HDD manufacturer's utility and select the long/thorough test. See what it has to say about the drive's health. You can then try and do a complete zero fill and see if the drive works, then use it to hold unimportant data for as long as it lasts. – Karan – 2012-11-30T01:02:28.963
1specifically what SMART metric has exceeded its threshold? they are not all equally serious, ranging from trivial to outright disastrous. I've often used SpeedFan in windows or gnome-disk-utility in ubuntu to read SMART data – Frank Thomas – 2012-11-30T04:16:44.613
Thanks for that tip @FrankThomas, I took a look at it using SpeedFan and found a surprisingly long list of issues... but they all seem related to the same blocking issues. I guess I need a tool to do repairs on the drive, but I get the feeling it's probably not worth it from what I'm reading. Anyway, that was an excellent tip, thank you! – xtraorange – 2012-11-30T06:06:32.647