Hard drive seek time???

Question

My hard drive was failing and active smart said it was the seek time, it has a threshold of 40 and it was down at 10. This has been going on for about a month. I turned it on when i got home this afternoon and SMART WARNING came up as usual and when i got into it i decided to start deleting old no longer used programs. I deleted 2 or 3 and turned the computer off. As i have already ordered a new hard drive and i have my info backed up and am no longer stressed about this, but i turned it on tonight to delete some more and there was no warning. I loaded and active smart control said the seek time had gone up from 10 to 100 and the condition was good and its expected life span is 2 1/2 years. Should i be worried, does it do this when its about to die, or should i just be happy its all fixed???

Answer 1

It's not really fixed, its injured and has made a partial recovery. Like you have already decided it's time to replace the drive.

Answer 2

I don't think removing programs could make that type of change happen. I am wondering if the problem is no so much with your hard drive but rather withe the controller card or the cable? If this is a desktop you could remove the power and try setting up the hard drive on the second controller card if you start to see things like this again.

Also, you may have a "bad" spot on your drive where an application that you removed was searching that spot on the hard drive. I would probably (at the very least) run chkdsk and maybe download a drive test and repair app that can mark bad spots then monitor your drive for bad spots to see if they start cropping up.

Answer 3

I can give you a link that deals with hard drive problems.
Some hard drive problems can be easily fixed yourself by using easily available tools. I found the info at http://fixit.in useful. Try this site, if you can get what is required.