Is my Hard Drive dying ?

[techspark]

Hello,

I know there are tons of threads related to this. I really have no clue whats happening with my drive. I have a 3 year old SATA seagate 1 tb drive and off late its giving me problems . At times i get bsod and i hv to restart my pc , at times it works perfectly for hours at stretch and at times it freezes up randomly.

I have ran a couple of tools to check my hard disk . The seatools from the manufacturers website, hd tune etc. The drive passes all tests without any issues. Although i get 2 warnings for the smart status - one is the spin retry count and one is for bad sectors . I have attached the screenshots below , please take a look.

some things that i have noticed :

1. At times , the drive makes some strange noise as if some metal part inside is getting dragged onto the surface.
2. I hear a click sound once in a while (not very often)

Please let me know what to do . The fact that the drive passes all tests from the manufacturer software , i cannot rma it even though its still under warranty. Also in one of the screenshot it says warranty replacement is not possible.

I dont want to lose important data and since hdd prices have gone very high now , i cannot afford to buy a backup drive.

 

[rolli59]

The sounds are definitely not normal and worth a RMA to me.

 

[RealBeast]

You need to backup important data ASAP. You could lose it at any time from a drive failure. I would backup the most important stuff first to optical media or flash drives and then to a web storage site if you cannot afford a HDD. Only then would I continue efforts to diagnose the drive issues.

 

[pjmelect]

If a computer freezes and does not recover then this often caused by faulty memory. If this is the case download and run memtest86 4.0a for at least three passes. If the computer freezes and then recovers, the fault could be due to the hard drive. To test download the manufactures diagnostic software from their web site.
BSOD are not normally caused by a faulty hard drive but could be caused by memory problems.

 

[techspark]

Thank you guys for your valuable inputs.

If a computer freezes and does not recover then this often caused by faulty memory. If this is the case download and run memtest86 4.0a for at least three passes. If the computer freezes and then recovers, the fault could be due to the hard drive. To test download the manufactures diagnostic software from their web site.
BSOD are not normally caused by a faulty hard drive but could be caused by memory problems.

Yes the computer freezes and does not recover even after 10 mins but this only happens on windows vista /win 7 not on windows xp. I have 3 os on the same drive. I hv to press the reset button on the cabinet to reboot the pc.

I had run memtest before but on the os - this time i will do it by creating a boot disc.

My hdd passes all basic tests from the manufacturer software so i m not sure if they will accept the drive for rma. How do i convince them its a bad drive ? I dont hear the click sound often either - its just once in a while.