SIGuardian is predicting my new harddrive is gonna fail on 11'th may

LegacyUser

Is this really true? It is not new as such. It is just over a year old. It is a Seagate Barracuda 40gig hard disk. I assume my warranty is over and am going to be replacing it with a Samsung one.

PS: How does one activate the warranty on a hard drive? Who do you deal with if it fails in a limited time?

Also, Do you trust SIGuardian?

Mutant_Fruit

I didn;t believe it when it said my harddrive was going to die within 2 weeks, but i did a little bit if backing up just in case.

Three days later it died, and refused to boot windows. Don't take SiGuradian as the gospel truth, just be wary, theres a good chance its right, but its not 100% accurate.

Backup now, and see if it dies later. And don't reboot! Its quite possible that the drive will fail to boot windows if it really is on the way out! Thats what happened to me; i rebooted and couldn't get into windows to recover more off it!

Woden

i dont' know when i first got it at the suggestion of mutant above it was predicting the hdd death in a couple of months but then it decided it wasn't going to happy until mid 2005, so i don't know tbh.

data

hostyle

Mutant_fruit: how sure are you that SiGuardian didnt cause the failure? I don't know anything about SIGuardian, but from other threads it seems to be always active and "monitoring your HDD". How exactly does it work - website seems rather amateurish and doesnt go into detail about what is happening - eg. http://www.siguardian.com/products/siguardian/index.html is just a blank page.

/me has his paranoid hat on

Mutant_Fruit

SiGuardian works by reading the SMART tags off your harddrives. These contain info about your harddrives health, and are contained in practically every drive that was made in the last 5 years.

Once it reads the tags, it stores their values in a little database. It then monitors the changes in the tags. In a perfectly healthy drive, the tags won't change much at all, in fact, they would probably never change.

But as a drive ages, its performance drops etc, and the tags change. When tags such as "read error rate" start increasing dramatically, its usually a sign that the drive is nearing the end of its life. And that is what SiGuardian looks for.

New drives have a "settling in period" where their tags change from factory values to actual values, so if you use siGuardian on a brand new drive, its possible that it will predict failure within a week, as the tags are changing constantly.

But, after a few weeks/months, this will stop, and your drives ETA of death will move to about 10+ years into the future.

EDIT: http://www.siguardian.com/products/siglite/index.html

SIGuardian Lite uses powerful code of SIGuardian. Each modern hard drive contains self-testing procedures. SIGuardian Lite uses the results of such self-tests to predict your hard drive lifetime. It monitors all your hard drives at startup and warns you if it detects any changes in disk drive’s internal structure. Moreover, SIGuardian Lite estimates the possible date of hard disk failure (or the end date of hard disk lifetime), so you can backup your data before the disaster occurs.

LegacyUser

Ok. Now its going nuts.

It is now saying my old hard drive is not going to die at all and my new Samsung Spinpoint which is about a month old is going to die on the 11'th July. Personally i wish i never installed this program as it keeps ****ing me about. Jesus. :mad:

Mutant_Fruit

Its not going nuts, its settling in.

It really needs 1 week before it gives a resonably accurate forecast.

Also, its probably monitoring non-critical things. Pop open the SiGuardian window, and go to the "Smart Details" window, and tell me what tags look dodgy (all tags that are changing a lot have ETA's beside em.

The only ones worth worrying about are ones relating to read errors, CRC errors and such things. Everything else you can set it to not monitor.

And if you read the FAQ (or even what i posted above) you'd see why it is initally giving dodgy readings.

New drives have a "settling in period" where their tags change from factory values to actual values, so if you use siGuardian on a brand new drive, its possible that it will predict failure within a week, as the tags are changing constantly.

LegacyUser

Fair enough. I will just wait a week and see if it pans out.

It says spin up time is missing one value compared to the rest of the values which are full. That ok in your opinion Mutant?

Thanks.

Mutant_Fruit

Yeah, spin-up time is non-critical, that can sfaely be ignored as long as it doesn't change dramatically.

LegacyUser

Downloaded Hutil.exe from the samsung website for my samsung drive to test it and it is perfect. Then when i booted SIguardian said it is perfect again. I changed the udma value from 100 to 133 just out of curiosity. What exactly does that do? Anyway, seems to be ok for now.:)