Dying hard drive or paranoia?

[ku]

I have a Gateway 7805u that I bought in December of 2008. I've been using it as my main computer since.

During my time with the computer, I've always noticed that the hard drive runs a little hot, especially when running hardware intensive games. The hard drive temperature shoots upwards of 60C, though I've seen it go as high as 66C back during the summer. I reckon this is due to poor ventilation by the hard drive and not due to HD activity (the highest temps I've seen was not when I was moving gigs and gigs of data but when playing Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2). Idle temps vary between 40-50.

I didn't pay much mind to it, but as of about a week ago, I've noticed that my computer briefly hangs (1-2 seconds, doesn't respond to mouse or keystrokes) periodically within a few minutes of turning the computer on. Then earlier today, when bringing my computer out of sleep mode, I noticed that the computer just sat there with all the power lights on until about 15-20 seconds later when I heard the hard drive finally spinning. This was when I was getting real worried, so I checked my hard drive diagnostic software and all looked well. Then just now, as I was watching a video, I just got a BSOD for the first time on this computer! I didn't have time to write down the error codes, unfortunately, before my computer automatically restarted.

Should I quickly buy another hard drive to back up all my things? Or am I jumping the gun here? Are there any other tests I can do to determine the health of my hard drive? Any help/advice is appreciated!

P.S.: I may be primed to thinking my hard drive is failing because my external began showing signs a month or two ago (haven't since used it but once or twice) with the dreaded helicopter noises. I don't suspect that these failures are linked since my external hard drive is almost 10 years old, so it's about time for it to go anyway.

EDIT:
Gateway 7805u
Intel Core2Duo P8400
4gigs ram
Vista x64
320gb 7200rpm HD (model number: WDC WD3200BEKT-22F3T0)

 

[Fayd]

....


i should stress this harder than is possible on forums.

imagine me yelling into your ear.


ALWAYS HAVE A CURRENT BACKUP AVAILABLE! HARDDRIVES SOMETIMES FAIL WITHOUT ANY WARNING SIGNS!


in any case, yes, copy data off to another location. and run a SMART test.

 

[ku]

Thanks for the response.

I have all my important documents on another computer as well as on the cloud, so I'm good there. I will, however, lose a lot of my software (which are a hassle to relicense) and all of my media as I don't have a suitable place to store them all. But this isn't my first time having trouble with hard drives; I've actually been "cursed" as far as hard drives go (got "deathstar" pwnt back in the day, as well as having 1 Fujitsu drive, 2 Hitachi drives, and 1 Seagate drive crap out on me in a one year period--and all those were for 1 computer!)

Anyway, I ran SMART tests and they all show up fine (as they almost always do even for dying HD's... at least in my experience). I'm going to defrag and chkdsk overnight... and I'll be really worried if either of those fail to complete. Sigh... might need to spend money that I don't have =(.

 

[RebateMonger]

There's really no excuse for losing programs or data when a hard drive fails. Today, there are many ways to make full image backups of your PCs. With such backups, a disk failure causes only a couple of hours of downtime and doesn't cause the loss of any programs or data.

Hard drives can and do fail at any time, often without warning. There's no sense in "worrying" about disk failure. Just put a (preferably automated) backup system in place. If the hard disk gives warning signs of failing (check your System Event Log for disk-related errors), you may want to replace it on your schedule rather than on an emergency basis.

 

[ku]

Backup images would be ideal, and I probably should have made them already. But I only have 1 hard drive at the moment and it won't be of any use if the hard drive with the image fails... unless there's something I'm missing (been out of the loop for a while).

 

[RebateMonger]

Backup images would be ideal, and I probably should have made them already. But I only have 1 hard drive at the moment and it won't be of any use if the hard drive with the image fails... unless there's something I'm missing (been out of the loop for a while).

If you have more than one computer, you may have enough disk space on another PC to make an image backup across your network. Maybe a friend has a spare USB drive you can borrow until you can afford a disk for backups.

 

[EvilHomer]

I had a similar problem ..I used a program called Spinrite ..I was able to fix a few bad clusters and recove the data on those clusters ...In the meantime ..BACKUP

 

[0roo0roo]

Thanks for the response.

I have all my important documents on another computer as well as on the cloud, so I'm good there. I will, however, lose a lot of my software (which are a hassle to relicense) and all of my media as I don't have a suitable place to store them all. But this isn't my first time having trouble with hard drives; I've actually been "cursed" as far as hard drives go (got "deathstar" pwnt back in the day, as well as having 1 Fujitsu drive, 2 Hitachi drives, and 1 Seagate drive crap out on me in a one year period--and all those were for 1 computer!)

Anyway, I ran SMART tests and they all show up fine (as they almost always do even for dying HD's... at least in my experience). I'm going to defrag and chkdsk overnight... and I'll be really worried if either of those fail to complete. Sigh... might need to spend money that I don't have =(.

smarts stats are calibrated so they reduce the chance of false positives aka drives that would fail outside the warranty period

so dont rely on it

 

[M0RPH]

You shouldn't assume it's the hard drive, it could be something else from the symptoms you described, and the temps you mentioned are not that out of the ordinary either. So run the diagnostic tests from the manufacturer and if that passes then you have to assume the drive is ok until you get some real indication of hard drive trouble. Keep an eye on your Windows system event log for hard drive related errors.

And yeah, back up your important data but also keep in mind that the majority of the time a drive is going bad you'll have time to get the data off. Rarely do drives just die all of a sudden where you can't recover anything (If it gets fried electrically yeah, but that's a different issue.)

 

[imported_NoGodForMe]

Had a hard drive in my main 24/7 machine become un-recognized. Lucky for me, I had another drive laying around. The bad drive came back after cooling off. Used a free unix utility called CloneZilla to clone the drive. Was going to RMA the drive back to Seagate, but the web site said to run tests first. The tests came back clean. I concluded the drive was over heating in the case. Now the drive is laying sideways on the floor outside the case and there haven't been any problems since.

This is why people have 2 computers with extra parts on the shelf. Those who only have 1 computer with no extra parts and no backup are just asking for it.

And now we talk about backups. You need multiple copies of your important stuff. Burn it to DVD using Nero.
Send it to a web host account offsite (Dreamhost, Carbonite, or Mozy)
Buy Novaback to save your machine including registry.
http://www.novastor.com/novabackup11/
Get the model of your current drive, buy another, and use CloneZilla to copy it. http://clonezilla.org/