Are these SMART values for my hard drive good or bad?

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I have the following SMART test values for my hard drive.

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(Click image to enlarge)

My computer sometimes stutters and runs very slowly, and I can hear the drive spin. I've never had any issues with hard disks, and I can't be sure what's going on.

I have a Lenovo Y580 laptop running Microsoft Windows 8 Pro with Intel Core i7, 4GB RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M GPU.

In my opinion I may need more RAM, but I don't think that will solve problem. I think that my hard drive is slow.

Do you have any thoughts?

Robert Iagar

Posted 2013-06-06T20:52:55.857

Reputation: 13

Answers

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I've always liked running Speedfan's hard drive test as it lets you submit the results to their server which provides nice a human-readable summary. I rely on this.

Also, if you notice a sharp decrease of any of the "normalized" values towards the threshold over time, it's probably time to get data off of it while you can and prepare to retire the unit. So really one snapshot isn't terribly useful, but one must track it over time.

There's a lot of debate as to the usefulness and ability of SMART to predict failures. You definitely have a problem if any of the parameters are below threshold, but it's possible for the unit to go belly up at any time with everything coming back above threshold. There is no substitute for backups.

Measuring HDD speed is not something SMART is meant to do, use other tools for that. (After looking at the screenshot more closely, I see it reports speed - there are tools which will test it thoroughly over a sustained timeframe if your current tool isn't doing that.) Also, hard drive becoming noisy over time is indicative of a problem ... all spinning media makes noise, but units becoming noisier over time is never a good thing.

LawrenceC

Posted 2013-06-06T20:52:55.857

Reputation: 63 487