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Community => The Lounge => Hardware/Software => Topic started by: Spanky on Saturday, April 10, 2010, 03:51:07 AM

Title: Why S.M.A.R.T. information is important
Post by: Spanky on Saturday, April 10, 2010, 03:51:07 AM
I recently bought a cheap hard drive from Newegg. It worked and had 92% health when piggy-backed onto a test computer. So I popped it in the computer it was meant to go in, installed Windows and everything went fine. Then I checked the S.M.A.R.T. info again, this time it was 82%:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/464376/untitled.bmp
(image was weirdly sized with img tags)

This is definitely abnormal and shouldn't happen (no jokes from Linux/Mac users about Windows damaging hardware). The hard drive shouldn't have even been at 92% out of the box but since it was needed quickly, I went ahead with it. It's worth noting that this drive also passed ALL Seagate Tools (it was as Seagate drive). Lesson: no matter wherever you buy your hard drives, test them before putting them into use.