New
#211
Wow! Thought this thread was pretty much dead!!
Agree with all mentioned by Kaktussoft. Has nothing to do with PW or Macrium. It's the drive itself. SMART is a set of counters that monitors certain aspects of the drive (and is actually built into the drive itself). It attempts to predict imminent failure is not always accurate, but cannot be ignored. Your HD could've been getting worse by the day, and the only way you would know the rate of degradation is by trending the attributes that SMART collects data on. SMART typically doesn't do that on its own, it just has cummulative counters and when one of those counters for a particular attribute hits a trigger point you get your warning.
The point is, when you power up your drive and check its SMART status, it tells you what state it's in at this very moment. In your case you know it's hit a trigger point for at least one of the attributes it monitors. But you don't know how it reached that trigger point. It could've been slowly degrading over the course of a long period of time (meaning you may have considerable access time left), or it could be that the monitored attribute has been degrading at a dramatic rate (meaning you have little to no access time left). That's at least part of why it can't be an accurate predictor of failure.
Without knowing which attribute has been violated I wouldn't even be able to say whether it's better to leave it powered or if it's okay to power it down. But when it is powered the only access to it should be to copy out your data (and if you have the opportunity to grab the most important in big chunks first all the better) -- no more testing/file system checking. And only access it via a bootable USB/CD/DVD. This is where a prior defrag would've helped to reduce excessive head travelling.
I only skimmed through the new posts here, so I'm not positive about your current status, but I hope that helps.
Last edited by F5ing; 06 Jul 2012 at 20:36.
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