external hard drive failing?

When I checked the health of my external hard drive today (a 500GB seagate inside a thermaltake enclosure connected via esata), I noticed it had a SMART error. Should I be concerned about this? Is the drive going to fail soon? Thanks

 

Its dying. Save all your data elsewhere and get it RMA'd.

 

Marvelous! What might have caused this?

 

It is most likely a manufacturing defect, or it suffered an impact.

 

"Demons of stupidity" is my guess. I am sorry it was just too easy if MOD's want to take my post count (1) away I would understand.

I do not know anything about your HDD such as age, usage and so on. Not that that would necessarily help me. Your temp certainly looks good. All HDD's do eventually decline (fail) with age, when this happens after 1 or two years it is called premature but is in no way any less real than when after 7 years I would say normal you got good use out of it. If it was jarred or overheated or something was a little off in manufacture all this can lead to a shorter life. I guess the best real world answer is it happens and always try to protect your DATA as it can happen. Like a bolt of lightning. But if it happens to you, you don't care that I never had that problem. My experience has no useful affect on your situation. If you can get your DATA off your drive you are doing good and the rest can be resolved. Good luck!

 

Anything could have caused. Internal mechanical failure, overheating, dust in the case (yes, I'm not kidding), a bump of the desk it was on, etc, etc.

Fact is, drives fail sometimes. The best you can do is to install the best backup strategy you can reasonably afford and not worry about it anymore.

 

Are external HD's supposed to make a "click" noise when you unplug the power?

Unplugged safely of course. My 2.5" inside an enclosure makes a noise when i shut down the computer or remove the device.

Ive had it for about 5 months now and its been doing it since day 1. Its working perfectly till this day

 

The click you here may just be the head parking, which is normal.

 

Hard drives eventually die. Some earlier than others. Manufacturers give a life of typically 100,000 hours which sounds a long time. However, 100 drives running 10 hours/day and 300 days /year would clock up 300,000 hours so, statistically, 3 would be expected to die during that time.

A single SMART error may not necessarily indicate imminent death (but keep your backups going). You should download and run the diagnostic software from the HDD manufacturer's website.

Increasing numbers of SMART errors are a clear indication of something dying. You can run the trial version of ActiveSMART for a month to watch the situation. However, it's not infalliable: 3 years ago it predicted that one of my HDDs was going to die because of raw read error rate errors. The HDD kept going and I think the problem was that the SMART data weren't being read properly. Seagate's diagnostic software couldn't find a problem.

John