Acer Aspire 3820TG killing hard drives?

Hi All,

Bought his machine exactly one year ago. About six weeks ago the hard drive started failing. It started being super slow, to the point that booting took minutes and copying all the data from it literally took days. In the middle of this it started to give SMART failure warnings.

I replaced the drive with another drive I had handy. This one had been working fine, but it only took a month before it started giving SMART failure warnings. It appears to be working fine, and chkdsk reported a couple of minor things but no major issues.

Thoughts? Is it just coincidence that the second drive might be failing? Or could there be a system or motherboard issue? Anything else I should be checking?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Regards,
Anthony

 

It may be the connector- that could result in some SMART errors.
Can you post a full smart status report?

 

"WARNING! The drive ST9500325AS, 500.1 GB [S/N:5VE7KDTV] indicated a S.M.A.R.T. error condition. Immediately back-up your data and replace this hard disk drive! A failure may be imminent."

According to the software, it seems like the reallocated sectors count (3) is triggering the alarm bells. Everything else is showing OK.

Code:

                                             
============================================================
This report created by Active SMART 
http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/
============================================================

S.M.A.R.T. status
Date: 2011/11/26 20:31:45

Model Name: ST9500325AS
Serial number:  5VE7KDTV
Capacity:  500.1 GB
Firmware:  0004SDM2
Drive interface: ATA
Current temperature: 36 °C (96 F)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
         Attribute Name                       Threshold     Value       Worst     Raw value  
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1   (01) Raw Read Error Rate                     6           102         96       135721481
3   (03) Spin Up Time                            0           98          98               0
4   (04) Start/Stop Count                        20          100         100            942
[COLOR="Red"][B]5   (05) Reallocated Sectors Count               36          3           3             1992[/B][/COLOR]
7   (07) Seek Error Rate                         30          73          60        24618681
9   (09) Power-On Hours                          0           99          99            1646
10  (0A) Spin Retry Count                        97          100         100              0
12  (0C) Device Power Cycle Count                20          100         37             912
184 (B8) End to End Error                        99          100         100              0
187 (BB) Reported Uncorrectable Errors           0           72          72              28
188 (BC) Command Timeout                         0           100         99     25770197001
189 (BD) High Fly Writes                         0           100         100              0
190 (BE) Airflow Temperature                     45          64          58       655425572
191 (BF) G-sense Error Rate                      0           1           1           342991
192 (C0) Power-off Retract Count                 0           100         100              0
193 (C1) Load/Unload Cycle Count                 0           86          86           28601
194 (C2) Temperature                             0           36          42     47244640292
195 (C3) Hardware ECC recovered                  0           56          50       135721481
197 (C5) Current Pending Sector Count            0           100         100              0
198 (C6) Uncorrectable Sector Count              0           100         100              0
199 (C7) UltraDMA CRC Error Count                0           200         200              0
254 (FE) Free Fall Protection                    0           100         100              0
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

That can't be caused by the notebook- this particular SMART error means the actual platter is failing, if it was interface related (Ultra DMA CRC) that would be a different thing.

So it looks like a bad coincidence.

 

OK, that makes sense. The drive I swapped in was a few years old.... Took it out of my Sony when I installed an SSD.

Thanks!

 

Just to follow up, put in a new HDD and everything has been fine since. Did a fresh install of Windows 7 too so the machine is running really well.

Thanks again @downloads for the advice.