Should my hdd's be replaced?

[oPolo]

I woke up this morning to a very scary experience.

My 1 TB WD Elements HDD was now being recognized as RAW instead of NTFS, and I could not access the stuff of it. Luckily that harddrive was only for obsolete stuff, so nothing of value was lost - luckily.

Afterwards I have been able to successfully reformat my harddrive as NTFS and disc- and reconnect it, both from the computer and from the powersource, and its still reading as NTFS now.

So I'm thinking my drive is OK, but:
I tried to run a harddisk health monitoring tool to see how it was faring.
Its telling me that my harddrive health is bad due to the S.M.A.R.T value "Reallocated sectors count" being bad.. Here is an image of it:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/13685979/Hdd_External.png

As you can see on the image.. something else scared me, its saying my internal notebook harddisk is bad too!
But for some other reasons. There is a picture of the smart values here:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/13685979/Hdd_Internal.png

I read a bit on the net, before asking here... I could see that I generally shouldn't be worried because of values such as the Start/Stop Count.

I now humbly ask you none the less, which knows more about it than I do. Is there any need for me to change my harddisks, based on what you see - is their demise close? Or is it just perhaps going to run a bit slower or something? Could I keep going with them and save a bit money, or is it time to change the harddives if I want to now my stuff is more safely stored?


Yea, I know about backup, and do have a 50gb dropbox for my most important stuff But lets face it, one does not want to loose even his less important or even obsolete stuff, if unavoidable It's only obsolete till its needed again, but its not that important that I want to have 2x harddrives to have a backup (although its important enough to not store on a sure to die harddrive)

Thanks a real lot!!!
Your answers is most appreciated!
Sorry I could not keep even a simple question short...

 

[tomatthe]

No one is going to be able to predict the life of your drives. The SMART feature is basically the best notification you will get as to predicting a drive is going to die. People ask here fairly often, "Is this SMART status right and should I really replace it" there is not an exact science to it, but that's the best system manufactures have come up with and should be taken as such imo. Personally I wouldn't use either of those drives if I didn't want to lose the data on them.

"But lets face it, one does not want to loose even his less important or even obsolete stuff, if unavoidable It's only obsolete till its needed again, but its not that important that I want to have 2x harddrives to have a backup (although its important enough to not store on a sure to die harddrive) "

This is a judgement call, if you're alright taking that risk then keep using the drive, and if/when it dies just accept it and move on.

If the drives are under warranty get them replaced while you still can, the manufacture of your laptop likely has a drive test you would run on it as well which may give you more info.

 

[dingo07]

Without even getting into WHETHER you should change your drives or not, if you do not have an SSD as a boot drive in a laptop, you're doing yourself the greatest disservice ever known to man.

Period

 

[fzabkar]

The WD drive has 1265 (= 0x4F1) bad sectors and IMHO it should be replaced.

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=0x4F1+in+decimal

The Seagate drive has one "pending" sector and a high Reallocation Event Count, so that would be a cause for concern. However, there are no reallocated sectors as yet.

The high Start/Stop Count and Load/Unload Cycle Count suggests that the APM setting is too aggressive. Although the Start/Stop Count (16) has dropped below its threshold (20), thus triggering CrystalDiskInfo's "BAD" diagnosis, this attribute is still only a wear-and-tear indicator rather than a critical health indicator.

The actual number of start/stop cycles is ...

0x15186 = 86406

The total Power-On Hours is 5376, so this means that the drive is parking its heads every ...

5376 x 60 / 86406 = 3.7 minutes

 

[ram1009]

Replace the drives.

 

[raytseng]

The real question is how hard up are you for money versus the time/effort lost should the drive fail? If it costs only $1 to replace the drive, then it's a nobrainer.

If this will cause you to have to take out a loan from a loan shark, or go hungry for a week, then don't do that!

I personally have deep pockets, so spending the $100 to not have to potentially deal with the annoyance of a drive failure annoyance, even if I could fix it, is worth it to me..

Also, if it's under warranty, you could get a new drive for free...

 

[fzabkar]

A warranty replacement drive will most probably be refurbished.