Could My HDD be Failing?

Hey guys!

I have a Seagate ST9320421AS 320GB hard drive in my laptop, upgraded from the stock drive from HP about 3 years ago. Over the month, I've noticed the hard drive slowing down. Programs take longer to start up, virus/malware scans take considerably longer than before (about twice as long), and I've just noticed a considerable slowness, accompanied by disk access.

About a month or so ago, I powered on my laptop (an HP Pavilion dv4), and it hung at the HP BIOS screen. No beeps, no error message - it simply halted and wouldn't load past the screen. I manually powered it down, removed the battery, discharged any electricity, plugged the battery in and then powered the system back on. It booted up normally after that, and I immediately backed up everything of value. It hasn't acted up since.

I ran HD Tune, and everything looks OK except for the "Spin Retry Count" which gives the following values:

Code:

Spin Retry Count    100    100    97    4    warning

Is this something to be concerned about? Is it possible my drive is failing?

 

Could Be.

Time to get off, you photo`s and other files you dont want to loose.

Maybe get a new hdd, and use the failing one as a storage drive for non important data, external cases are only 5$ on ebay.

ZAR - Quick guide to understanding S.M.A.R.T. information

 

I would back anything important up just in case it does fail in the near future. Seagate has a HD tester found http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools, I've also used drive fitness test with good results.

 

Thanks guys!

Well, I ran Seatools and it didn't find anything wrong - no errors or warnings for the S.M.A.R.T. check. I also installed Speedfan to check and again, everything looks ok. I wonder if the error from HD tune is a false positive?