Due to a badly planned installation of two hard drives I may have overheated one of them (perhaps both).  I had them installed right above eachother in my tower and when I pulled my 160GB drive out the other day it was too hot to hold or touch.  It’s probably been like this for months at least if not a year.

I ran SpinRite 6 on it yesterday and the ECC Correction count was in the millions.  I am guessing this is bad, very bad.

I have backups but given the nature of the data on this drive (all my digital photos) should I trash it and buy a new one?

I have never received any errors in normal usage, Spinrite was the program that told me this was going on in the drives S.M.A.R.T. statistics.

I have rearranged the drives to maximize air flow and thier temps are way down but it may be too late for this guy.

check the manufacturer’s warrenty.  WD offered 3 years for their drives.  i had 2 drives fixed in the last 10 years

These are Maxtor and may be covered under warranty but I wonder if it may be possible for them to see what the max temp for the drive was and claim “abuse”.  They would certainly be justified.

My main question is should I stop trusting this drive?

P.S.  Apparently I have moved into the “Naughty Right Shift Key” level of posting. What does “Naughty Right Shift Key” refer to?

it could just be faulty. 

i’ve had 2 hd stacked on on top of each other and sandwiched between a cd-rom and a floppy with now problems.

btw. i don’t trust smart.  smart didn’t save my last 1.8” mitsutsi hd. 

and it doesn’t hurt to ask maxtor if they’ll cover it. 

cheers

[quote author=“jso902”]it could just be faulty. 

i’ve had 2 hd stacked on on top of each other and sandwiched between a cd-rom and a floppy with now problems.

btw. i don’t trust smart.  smart didn’t save my last 1.8” mitsutsi hd. 

and it doesn’t hurt to ask maxtor if they’ll cover it. 

cheers

I know… S.M.A.R.T. does absolutely nothing… my TR’s 1.8” was going and it detected nothing wrong… Had to use the Hitachi provided hard disk checker…

[quote author=“AndyMac”]P.S. Apparently I have moved into the “Naughty Right Shift Key” level of posting. What does “Naughty Right Shift Key” refer to?

It refers to the right shift key on the TR because it is half the size of the regular (left) shift key.
It was just an exaggerated running joke.

SMART may or may not be useless but if it’s telling me that it’s using CRC error correction so much I am thinking that’s a problem.

I see 160GB drives are less than $100, I will probably just replace it.  The data is just too important.

The other drive is acting odd, making some strange noises when copying files to it.  It showed 16 seek errors when running spinrite.  It’s only 60GB and those go for about $60 so I will replace it too I think.

I haven’t lost any data on the drives which I guess is a testament to the durability (and fragility) of these things… Yet…..

That’s why I do backups I guess.

if they replace it for the cost of shipping… that’s still a deal. 

:wink: