Help! My laptop drive may be dying.

[Søren Schmidt]

Bruce M Simpson wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My laptop drive might be dying. It is a Samsung MP0804H which I have 
> used for around 28 months without issue.
>
> Every now and then it will click and sound as though it is thermally 
> recalibrating itself.
>
> I ran SMART diagnostics from smartmontools, and Samsung's own diag 
> tools which all report the drive is OK (a full captive surface test). 
> I see nothing untoward in the SMART info pages.
Well, sounds like the drive is indeed dying, recalibrating noises like 
that is a bad sign, its most likely having real trouble reading certain 
areas of the medium.

If your SMART output tells anything about read retries or number of 
remaps that could be an indicator of upcoming problems, however not all 
drives has that info in the SMART pages.

In the real world scenario SMART can only tell you about the problem 
when the drive has given up on the data, there is almost newer any real 
prewarns to failure.
>
> Whilst Windows is able to tolerate the retrying of ATA commands which 
> this click appears to be inducing, FreeBSD can easily get sick and 
> just hang, which majorly gets in the way of real work.
Depends on whats happening, you could try to up the timeout in 
ata-disk.c and see if it survives the errors that way, to at least try 
to save the data before its too late.

-Søren