Hello, my HDD has been acting weird lately, and I am wondeing what's going to happen to its fate. Since I use a IBM T42 Laptop, it would be pretty bad if the drive fails. Currently, I am checking my HDD condition using: HDDlife, SIGuardian, HDD Health, and HDD Tune. Around the beginning of this year, my HDD started to make a "ticking" sound (not loud clicking sound) and I became worried about my HDD. I downloaded the four HDD indicators, and my HDD performance was down to 82% based upon HDDlife, and SIGuardian reported a TEC date of Febuary 3rd! I paniced and made a post on this website, and was told to go to PC pitstop to findout the problem. The Pitstop diagnosed my drive as being excessivly fragmented, with over 56% fragmentations along with disk shortage, which I only had 10% free. I defragmented my HDD, backup my files like there was no tommorow, and prayed to God (lol) and a few days later, the problem was miraclously fixed! During the last weeks of January and early Febuary, my HDDlife reported a HDD performance between 98-100%, and SIGuardian didn't report a TEC date that's within this year. I once in a while got a slight "ticking" sound from my HDD, but whenever that happens, I know that my HDD was fragmented over 10% or excessivly heated (over 42 degrees celcius). Looking back at it now, the only realistic problem I had was regulating the drive temperature since my drive temperature could go up to 45 degrees Celcius when it defrags. Everything back then seemed to have been fine. The current problem: Beginning this week, my HDDlife reported a performance drop of 2%, making it down to 98%. SIGuardian also reported a TEC date of Sepetember 2005, and so I checked what S.M.A.R.T. indicator reported the TEC, and found that the spin up time decreased from 300 to 282. Thinking that it was only a temporary glitch in the software due to my 24/7 online activity, I decided to use my laptop moderatly, only turning it on whenever I need to. Since I left my computer on almost 24/7 back in January even when it reported crashing on Febuary 3rd, I thought this was the right choice. I also continued to defragment my drive more often, defragmenting it whenever it goes over 3%. However, yesterday when I turned my Laptop on, my HDDlife reported a performance drop to 85% and the SIGuardian reported a TEC date of June 2005! AND for today, when I rebooted my computer, the performance dropped to 72% and the TEC date is now, April 21st! The spin up time is now down to 202 even though I have less than 1% fragmentation! In other words, what I am asking is: 1. Should I leave my computer on longer? 2. Is there a way to improve my spin up time? (Like decrease the number of startup programs? Decreasing HDD thermal recalibration???) 3. Is the spin up time really vital to the performance and durability of a laptop HDD? 4. Do you think the indicators are just duds? 5. Should I start backing up my stuff even though, my HDD is not really "ticking"? 6. What would you do in my position? Some information: HD Tune: HTS548080M9AT00 Health ID Current Worst ThresholdData Status (01) Raw Read Error Rate 100 100 62 0 Ok (02) Throughput Performance 100 100 40 1962 Ok (03) Spin Up Time 202 202 33 2 Ok TEC: 21 4 (04) Start/Stop Count 98 98 0 3516 Ok 2005 (05) Reallocated Sector Count 100 100 5 0 Ok (07) Seek Error Rate 100 100 67 0 Ok (08) Seek Time Performance 100 100 40 0 Ok (09) Power On Hours Count 91 91 0 4157 Ok TEC: 2 9 2009 (0A) Spin Retry Count 100 100 60 0 Ok (0C) Power Cycle Count 100 100 0 280 Ok (BF) (unknown attribute) 100 100 0 0 Ok (C0) Power Off Retract Count 100 100 0 20 Ok (C1) Load Cycle Count 92 92 0 83694 Ok TEC: 14 10 2009 (C2) Temperature 144 144 0 786470 Ok (C4) Reallocated Event Count 100 100 0 3 Ok (C5) Current Pending Sector 100 100 0 0 Ok (C6) Offline Uncorrectable 100 100 0 0 Ok (C7) Ultra DMA CRC Error Count 200 200 0 0 Ok Power On Time : 4157 Health Status : Ok HDD Freespace: 10Gigs out of 69 (10.2%)

get a new hd if ur really concerned....but STOP worring ur self. Defrag once week and forget about it.

No harddrive should make any kind of regular ticking sound. If the sound was actually coming from your harddrive and not somewhere else, like a piece of dust caught in your case fan for example, your drive is in the process of failing, sorry to bring you the message. It could run for months, or fail tomorrow. Definitely back up your data on a daily basis. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime; Then industry pollutes the water and kills all the fish.

ibm hard drives have been known to have problems...at least a long time ago. Try doing a search on google about it.

For some reason, the health went back up to 85% just now. Anyways, thank you very much everyone for your comments.

I use the same HDD in my Dell laptop and there is a firmware update to fix this problem see the following Dell link: http://support.euro.dell.com/uk/en/filelib/index.aspx?sid=LAT_PNT_PM_D600&cat=0&os=WW1&dev=4953&devlib=26 Don't know if you can use this download but there must be a generic version available from Hitachi.