Does anybody know of a good source for infomation on SMART hard drive technology? The information I've found is nebulous at best...am I to assume that any SMART failure means a hard drive needs to be replaced? I have a drive that is reporting a "spin retry count" failure. What does that mean? Is this drive shot to hell? Any answers would be greatly appreciated.

I have a drive that has EXACTLY the same problem. My assumption has been, that if your molex connectors are not FIRM (ie the little metal sleeves inside the molex have started to become less tight, fixable with a pair of pinchers) then the drive as it spins up, vibrates and the connection to the power cable is not prefect and cuts in and out. Sometimes my wife's pc does this, so I need to get back in there and tighten those babies up. If it fails to power up each time it is requested to do so, then that counts against that SMART thing. My wife has a 40 gig maxtor with smart failure on sppin retry, and it has been renning solidly now for probabnly 6 months, day in, day out, with a lot of usage. Thats all I got to say. I switch SMART reporting off in the bios.

It's not "smart" to disable the SMART function. It's an advanced warning system to let you know when your hard drive's about to crap out. It gives you fair warning to let you have time to back it up. But if you so choose to disable it then the way you're gonna find out you "HAD" a problem is when the drive craps out. And it's all ways between back ups... I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid...

I second setishock. Go HERE to read the short background plus the set of attributes the HD uses to measure its S.M.A.R.T. status. BTW this site has a link to download or run the HD fitness test. i_XpUser

In my opinion, there is no substitute for a daily backup system, so I think for me, SMART is moot and more of an annoyance...I'm for disabling it. I guess the real question I have is this: Are any of the SMART failures repairable? Or is it strictly an early warning system that says no matter what you do, the drive is shot? I've tried XxxFrancisxxxUSA's suggestion, but the spin retry count failure persists.