SMART technology isn't so smart after all.

[KJ3N]

This is going to be a long post, filled with computer geek shit. Those of you that bore easily, or your eyes glaze over when reading technical jargon, can skip this one. If you decide to read on, remember, you've been warned.

For the last week or two, I've been having issue with my main computer where the Windows 10 partition takes forever to boot and the HD thrashes away for up to an hour after the desktop comes up and the entire system was abysmally slow. For whatever reason, the Linux Mint partition didn't seem to have these issues, so I thought the problem was some sort of system corruption in W10 only.

I finally ran some diagnostic tools and found that the old PATA 250GB boot drive (manufacture date 4/2005) was failing. Loads of re-allocated sectors, bad sectors that couldn't be re-allocated, etc. Strangely enough, there were never any S.M.A.R.T. warnings at any time, either in W10 or Mint. Apparently (at least in this case), S.M.A.R.T. isn't as helpful as they would have you believe.

The system has 3 HD drives:
1) 250GB PATA boot drive (12 years old, failing)
2) 320GB PATA data drive #1 (7 years old, 70% full)
3) 250GB SATA data drive #2 (6 years old, 25% full)

The choices were:
1) Purchase new 240GB SSD and leave the data drives as they are. This leaves the aging data drives as potential time bombs.
2) Purchase a new 1TB drive, consolidate the 2 older data drives into the new drive, then use the 250GB SATA drive as the replacement boot drive.
3) Purchase new 240GB SSD and new 1TB data drive. Consolidate both of the old data drives into one. The SSD becomes the boot drive. Relatively expensive option, not really in the budget.

In the end, I went with option #2. A 1TB HD is $50 and it just so happens that I still had a $50 gift card from Newegg. This essentially made the cost out of pocket $0.

The consolidation of the older data drives went without much fanfare. I cloned the 320GB drive to the 1TB drive (adjusting the partition size to fill the new drive), then copied all the data from the 2nd data drive to the 1TB drive. It took a couple of hours to move almost 280GB.

The plan for the boot drive was to clone it to the 250GB SATA drive. This did not go well. After trying for 2 hours under two different cloning software packages, the cloning failed (no surprise, really) because of bad sectors on the failing drive. In the end, I had to pull all the user data I could, then do a fresh install of both W10 and Linux Mint on the 250GB SATA drive. Annoying, but I didn't really have much of a choice.

I still have some software to re-install, but the system appears to be running normally again.

[PA5COR]

I'm not a data freak, my SSHD is 240 GB and still have 175 left, and a 160 GB USB 3 HD to run my back up on.
I don't play games, nor watch movies on the laptop, nor save movies, just some antenna books, and 20 GB music and electronic PDf's about ham radio.
I run a back up 9 sequential) every week, so if something fooks up i never loos much data.
Good to see you sorted it in the long run though ;)

[KC2UGV]

Did you try Norton Ghost for the imagining?

I've found it will pretty much clone any drive, regardless of bad sectors. It will just take longer the worse off the drive is.

[KJ3N]

Did you try Norton Ghost for the imagining?

I've found it will pretty much clone any drive, regardless of bad sectors. It will just take longer the worse off the drive is.

No. I haven't used Ghost in years.

By the time I got to the 2nd failed cloning attempt, it was simply easier to do the re-install. I had wasted enough time on it already.

[KD8TUT]

One thing to note:

Some implementations of SMART are pretty bad depending on the bios. Less expensive, or OEM, boards often have SMART in the bios but it doesn't work very well.

Been down that road a bunch of times. Very picky about the boards I buy.

[K0RGR]

I got tired of this kind of wrangling a very long time ago. It was OK when I thought I had the time to tinker endlessly, but now, I'm really spoiled. I have moved most everything I need to the cloud - with the exception of some slightly confidential stuff that doesn't go there. So, if my computer melts down overnight, which has been known to happen, my email, my important documents, and the family pictures are either in the cloud or backed up on other computers I have locally.

I do run backups on the computer from time to time.

[KG4NEL]

I got tired of this kind of wrangling a very long time ago. It was OK when I thought I had the time to tinker endlessly, but now, I'm really spoiled. I have moved most everything I need to the cloud - with the exception of some slightly confidential stuff that doesn't go there. So, if my computer melts down overnight, which has been known to happen, my email, my important documents, and the family pictures are either in the cloud or backed up on other computers I have locally.

I do run backups on the computer from time to time.

I just keep a complete backup of everything I don't want to lose on a drive at my office. Been too close to too many house fires to keep my backup anywhere near the drive at home. Take it home about once a month to update.