Should SMART be dropping on a brand new drive?

I just bought the 500gb Hitachi from the egg... first day I had it the drive was at 97% health, 100% performance.

Today (3 days later) the drive is at 94 94 most likely from the one "good"

I attempted to use the Hitachi diagnostic tool but it didn't want to find my drive so I gave up.


I am extremely paranoid about drives right now... On Saturday my Hitachi 160gb completely died without warning. SMART on Friday was at 97% and it just started to click. Computer stopped seeing it, all attempts to connect to the drive failed so I concluded the controller most likely fried. Only got another Hitachi because I liked what I saw in terms of speed/price... and my 160gb Hitachi didn't die yet.

Manufactured Dec 07, used it for 14 months had 6474 hours (+5 hours or so for the next day) according to SMART. So now its a paperweight with 2 months of lost data... Hope the drive suffers and never rests in peace

 

51C??? That's rather toasty for a hard drive... And yes it's normal SMART value to start dropping once you start using the disk but as long as the drop is reasonable and doesn't appear in section like the spin retry count or such there is nothing to worry about. Your HD temp is high tho... I wonder if the previous hard drive didn't die because of that. Maybe you should invest in a notebook cooler.

 

As a matter of fact I DO use a laptop cooler.

I have a DV2700 and my palm rest (right above the drive) gets hot. I tried to figure out the source of the heat but was unsuccessful. There aren't any chips above it that should get warm other than a modem. I can only tell you that my palm rest is hot even without a drive in it. I used to think my drive just runs hot but I used it for a few hours without a drive and it was still very warm to the touch (USB linux rescued me from boredom)

*shakes fist at HP* never again....

 

51C is OK. I got a Hitachi 5k500 and it's been running around 50C for a long time without issues. I rather stick with a drive that is around 50C rather than being too cold as there is very fast moving parts inside, some heat is good.

Hitachi specifies up to 55C as OK, so there should be no worries really.

 

If anyone has this Hitachi drive, I was wondering how high your load cycle count goes. Mine is at 3479 which is a bit high (total hours SMART reports is 321) that's 10 times a hour. I saw the number increment by 1 after the last click sound I heard so I know thats what I am hearing.

My Vista power settings with the exception of power saver on battery will keep the drive always on. As a matter of fact I just changed it to be Never for all profiles.

It annoys me to hear the click of of the head parking and reengaging, possibly because I heard that a LOT before my previous drive died and I just assumed the power save was kicking in.

I tried to run the bootable hitachi disk once to do a diagnostics, but it wouldn't find my SATA controller because I have a HP laptop without legacy IDE mode.
So if by default its supposed to do this so often, like some crazy power scheme where the high load cycles are logically normal then I will leave it.

I don't really want to take it out and plop it in my desktop in hopes it can find it to let me tweak those settings.

 

I have the 5k500.b as well.

My load cycle count is even higher compared to the amount of time. 3416 after 271 hours.

Is this something to worry about?

 

I am not sure if its just a power saving feature which is increasing the load cycles. But today as I was reading something I heard what sounded like a head crash. Which made me very paranoid. >_<

Edit: It did it again, its a very brief sound like metal to metal for less than a second.

Great... 500gb drive might be on it's way out... -_-

I wonder if mine is considered "constant"

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=364014&page=5

5k500.B makes really weird sounds

 

Here's the SMART data for my 5K500.B as reported by SiSoftware Sandra.

However, I've yet to find a program which gives me total confidence in its interpretation of the SMART data. One program you can try is ActiveSMART, which monitors the SMART data and warns of any changes. There is a free one month trial.

John

 

FWIW, my Hitachi 250 Gb 7200 rpm drive is running at 42c. I have all indexing shut down.

 

Sorry a bit late in replying, but thank you for the chart.
I divided 9596/669 (load/hour) and its roughly 14 times a hour in terms of load/unload. Mine is at about 12 so I guess thats perfectly normal for this drive! I am not so concerned about the SMART on it anymore because both bars stabilized at 93% and who knows where that "health" static comes from :]

I was just getting worried about perhaps my SATA controller going, bad power, or a defective drive. Logically all three were potential problems for me because I had a 160gb Hitachi die for no reason and as far as I know, the controller board blew and the drive itself did not have any problems.

After loosing like a month's worth of data due to poor backup habits and hearing such odd sounds from the drive I resorted to buying a Buffalo Linkstation 1tb now Cobian backup runs daily over wifi doing backups. But at least I know I don't have to worry about a bum drive. Thank you!