Horror: Is my new HD dying?

[pandisv]

It all started 2 days ago. I noticed that the PC was making a clicking noise. I didn't pay much attention, thought it was the fan (sometimes my PC makes weird noises and when I turn it on again it doesn't ). At first I thought that the noise was coming from the 6 year old 40MB Samsung drive (/dev/hda) I have, so I copied my files from there to the 3 [/list][/list]months old Seagate 160GB IDE drive (/home and / partitions here, /dev/hdb). (took half an hour for 6 GB ). The noises though persisted and upon ear inspection seem to be coming from my NEW drive

I ran a short SMART test on it, it passed it. So I figured out that it's one of those come-and-go-things. Today I was doing some homework and heard the computer going clicky again. I went over to it and found it that something was really bad. It hadn't crashed but it was under really heavy load (keyboard wouldn't work but mouse would, KDE not responsive though). After 10min of agonizing over what is going on, it cleared up. I did a dmesg and I could see lots of errors from the ide-driver, which was restarted by the kernel about 20 times or so. Foolishly, I didn't save it.

I tried then to run a smartctl, so I had to do a 'man smartctl' first. I tried and 'man' would not find (nothing appropriate) the very page I was reading the previous day. I forced an ext3fs check on boot and rebooted. It found errors, but were supposedly corrected. It went up, but some files are obviously missing (gaim's accounts, ff's history but nothing of importance as far as I can see). The clicking noises are still here.

Is my new hd dying or should I believe SMART ?


smartctl -a /dev/hdb :
Device Model: ST3160812A
Serial Number: 3LS0GY05
Firmware Version: 2AAA
User Capacity: 160,041,885,696 bytes
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: 7
ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is: Sat Mar 11 14:02:08 2006 UTC
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status: (0x82) Offline data collection activity
was completed without error.
Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled.
Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed
without error or no self-test has ever
been run.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection: ( 430) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities: (0x5b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
Suspend Offline collection upon new
command.
Offline surface scan supported.
Self-test supported.
No Conveyance Self-test supported.
Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
power-saving mode.
Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported.
General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 1) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 54) minutes.

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 048 030 006 Pre-fail Always - 141451143
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 099 099 000 Pre-fail Always - 0
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 99
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always - 2
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 078 060 030 Pre-fail Always - 4367441899
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 1438
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 097 Pre-fail Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 109
187 Unknown_Attribute 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
189 Unknown_Attribute 0x003a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
190 Unknown_Attribute 0x0022 068 063 045 Old_age Always - 588578848
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 032 040 000 Old_age Always - 32 (Lifetime Min/Max 0/16)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 045 041 000 Old_age Always - 79224994
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
202 TA_Increase_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0

SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 1437 -
# 2 Short offline Completed without error 00% 1421 -
# 3 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 1232 -
# 4 Short offline Completed without error 00% 1230 -
# 5 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 0 -

SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
1 0 0 Not_testing
2 0 0 Not_testing
3 0 0 Not_testing
4 0 0 Not_testing
5 0 0 Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0x0):
After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.


Edit: Nothing weird shows up in 'dmesg' now though. Still clicking.
Edit2: Forgot to mention: stable packages installed everywhere, suspend2-sources-2.6.15-suspend2-r6 and I suspend-to-swap regularly.

[frostschutz]

No the clicking noise is perfectly normal every HD does it you should put all your important data on it and destroy all backups.