Things were sluggish so I rebooted to this message: "Failure predicted on Primary Master:ST340016A.... A failure may be imminent" I have an Asus A7V333 Mobo and the voltage is reading too high even with updated BIOS and drivers. Others are having this problem witht he mobo too. Can a voltage problem here wreck my HDD? Do you think my HDD is permanently damaged (i'm typing this on the same machine that got the message), or if I get a new mobo do you think things will be ok? Thanks

If the voltage that is too high is on your +12V or +5V line then yes this can cause failure. All drives run off the +12 and +5 volt lines and so any irregularities in either of these lines can cause damage. My question is how high is too high? Most systems/hardware can withstand at least a 10% deviation (maybe more). Meaning the voltage can be anywhere between 10.8 volts and 13.2 volts on the 12 volt line and 4.5 - 5.5 volts on the 5 volt line. How long has the drive been running? Most HDD have a life expectancy of 100,000 hours which is about 11.5 years of constant running. Now this is under "ideal circumstances". No harddrive is ever run under ideal circumstances - voltage drops/spikes, power outages, powering up/down, overheating, and many other things can and will shorten drive life. The message is generated via S.M.A.R.T. Which is a harddrive monitoring system that will warn you if the drive is "dying". I recommend doing regular (at least weekly) backups of important data. You can disable the S.M.A.R.T. system in your BIOS, this get rid of the message. You can expect anywhere between 1 minute and many years of service from the drive still. Most people will say to replace the drive but it is not needed. Just keep your backups up to date and keep in mind that the drive may die any time now (but that's true for ANY hardware).

I would replace the drive as soon as possible. It is going to fail if you are getting the SMART message. It will be easier to do the replacement when you have time to make the necessary backups first than chance loosing your data.

I got a message like that and drive failed within one week, start checking sales on hard drives, I bought a 60gb Maxtor for 99.00 at Best Buy with a 40.00 rebate so only paid 59.00 for it, instead of running out and buying check online for deals at Best Buy, Circut City, Staples (alot of these stores have them on sale because the real large hard drives are sworming the stores) it's really hard to beat Best Buy's prices with their rebates.

If Smart is Enabled it could be the problem: This option enables/disables support for the hard disk's S.M.A.R.T. capability. The S.M.A.R.T. (Self Monitoring Analysis And Reporting) technology is supported by all current hard disks and it allows the early prediction and warning of impending hard disk disasters. You can enable it if you are using S.M.A.R.T. aware utilities to monitor the hard disk's condition. Enabling it also allows the monitoring of the hard disk's condition over a network. However, there's a possibility that enabling S.M.A.R.T. may cause spontaneous reboots in networked computers. Johnathan P. Dinan mentioned such an experience with S.M.A.R.T. enabled. S.M.A.R.T. may be sending packets of data through the network even though there's nothing monitoring those data packets. This may have caused the spontaneous reboots that he had experienced (Comment #103). So, try disabling HDD S.M.A.R.T. Capability if you experience reboots or crashes while you are on a network. For most users, the S.M.A.R.T. capability isn't really useful or necessary. In fact, all the constant S.M.A.R.T. traffic eats up some bandwidth. So, if you don't use S.M.A.R.T. aware utilities or don't need that level of real-time reporting, disable it for better system performance.