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A lot of people depend on S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology--probably a backronym) statistics to see when their hard drives are going to die.
Let this be a warning to those people!
My older laptop, phoenix, had a 60 GB drive with SMART. I ran smartd, and occasionally took a look at the statistics with smartctl, to make sure nothing was going wrong. I had a few reallocated sectors, but nothing to cause concern.
Then, suddenly, the drive started making a whining noise, and wouldn't read data unless I was rocking the laptop's case back and forth. I'm pretty sure the motor was stalling, since it eventually recovered. Then, a few months later, it stalled again, for another few days. Each time, I managed to back up all of my data with rsync. If I ran SMART tests, they would take forever, and then return with no errors. If I ran the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test that PC's for Everyone had me run when I called service, it returned the message "low performance", but didn't say the drive was broken.
Then, one last time, it finally stopped working. Rocking the case no longer worked; I had to smack it pretty hard to get it to finish the last backup it would ever run. Then, when I tried turning it on a few days later (to see if maybe the drive had recovered), I finally got the BIOS error: "SMART status: Drive failed. BACKUP and REPLACE!".
So let this be a lesson: back up your data now, and don't depend on SMART to warn you when the hard drive is going to fail.
