I guess I should believe S.M.A.R.T. ?

[TugBoat]

If I'm to believe S.M.A.R.T. in Disk Utility and DiskWarrior I'm about to have my first ever 3.5" drive failure. I found my souped up Sawtooth KPed a little while ago. The Panic log says 'System Call', I've never had this thing KP before. Well, there was that time when I was playing around with a poorly flashed video card... But that was remedied...

Now DU and DW say my 3 year, 4 month old Western Digital 80GBer is about to die. Yep, it has a three year warranty. I'd say for the first 2.75 years it had about normal usage. The last 6-7 months it's been run 24/7.

Is there anyway to reset the Smart detector (or whatever it's called) on the disk to see if the KP might have just triggered it in error?

[Case]

I've recently replaced two drives after SMART messages. One gave boot and mount problems, after a re-format it says SMART not supported (?). It seems to function okay, although I won't trust the drive for anything important. The other is stored away until I get to re-formatting and/or secure erasing.
I fear the 24/7 running might have contributed to their status. I replaced them with (larger) Western Digitals, and don't run 24/7 anymore. And I run SMARTReporter now.
Not sure what KP is...

[Ai Haibara]

I take it KP = kernel panic.

[TugBoat]

I guess the thing has had it. Right after Disk Utility and Diskwarrior pronounced it terminal, I shut it down and pulled the smaller slave drive. Then rearranged the Dual G4, pulled a WD 120GB from it and put it in the Sawtooth. I tried to clone the startup disk but the thing Panicked again within 10 minutes. Tried again and it panicked within 5 minutes.

It did manage to clone everything while booted off the Tiger CD. Then after reboot(s), more Panics. I had to remove the WD 80GBer to stop the Panics. It's been running off the 120 now about an hour and seems alright. It looks like the only damage is that Azureus lost all of the download it was working on.

Right out of the blue... Bam! You're dead.

[terryj]

It did manage to clone everything while booted off the Tiger CD.

I 'm curious...was this a factory Tiger Install CD or a custom jobber
you made yourself? A normal Tiger Install CD would go straight
into the Installer Utility, and not let you see any mounted drives
outside of Disc Utility....

I suppose now your going to toot about the Reliabilty of
your Seagates vs. WD.... :P ....But hey, you got damn near
the full 3years out of it, more than most people can say.


As for out of the blue...well, it would be nice if everytime you booted
the computer, it will tell you " you have xxx of life left in this HD"
but we haven't gotten there....yet.

[TugBoat]

I should have said Restored everything.... It's the standard Tiger CD, I used the restore function in Disk Utility to copy everything to the 'new' drive while booted from the CD.

Back when the FW800 G4 was new I bought 3 drives at once, all Western Digital. One 80GB and Two 120GB. Now if one of these 120s goes south anytime soon you're going to hear some bitchin'. It is interesting that the *only* 3.5" drive I've ever had fail was a Western Digital and it's not that old. I still have the 80MB drive that came in my IIsi (1991?) and as far as I know it still works

Hey, the Dual has an open drive bay, gotta fix that....

Case, thanks for the tip on SMARTReporter, it's up and running