[shinji]

In bay 2 of my Mac Pro, I have a Western Digital 750 gb drive. It has over the past month or so been giving a number of annoying problems, like occasionally failing to copy a file, very slow search, etc. on and off.

Today I went into disk utility, and it says "the drive has a hardware problem that cannot be repaired" and says s.m.a.r.t. failed. I tried to erase it in disk utility (have backups, this isn't a boot drive) and disk utility wasn't even able to unmount it...disk utility itself crashed at that point.

I took the drive out and put it in a USB enclosure...works fine. Fast transfer speeds, no problems, and I was even able to run verify disk in disk utility and everything looks ok. Even files that were failing when connected via sata are working over usb. Only thing is through the enclosure, I have no way of checking s.m.a.r.t.

Does this likely mean there is a problem with the drive, or just a problem with the sata port? Is s.m.a.r.t. very accurate to begin with?

[OreoCookie]

If it says smart status failed, the drive is almost dead! Stop using it immediately and get a replacement! Only use the drive to migrate your data to the new drive.

Just to be sure, I'd put the drive in another bay and try it there. If the SMART status still says that the drive is failing, don't take any bets. It is very, very rare that there are false positives and usually the problem is that the SMART status still claims the drive is healthy when it's not.

[shinji]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie 

If it says smart status failed, the drive is almost dead! Stop using it immediately and get a replacement! Only use the drive to migrate your data to the new drive.

Just to be sure, I'd put the drive in another bay and try it there. If the SMART status still says that the drive is failing, don't take any bets. It is very, very rare that there are false positives and usually the problem is that the SMART status still claims the drive is healthy when it's not.

Put it in another bay and yeah, it failed SMART there, too.

I replaced the drive and when I booted up, I got a flashing question mark on a folder. So I turned my mac off with the power button, waited, turned it back on, and then it booted back up. Disk utility came up and let me format the drive.

But now I've somehow lost the startup chime? What could possibly be causing that now? Does that indicate some additional problem here?