You receive a message that
"S.M.A.R.T. failure detected" or the message
about impending hard drive failure on one of your drives.
So, what’s the next step?
Try to avoid cycling the power on your PC. This is because the on-off
power cycle puts the greatest amount of stress on disk drives, and
it is possible your drive may not start up again after spinning
down.
Please note that not all S.M.A.R.T. events are critical. Some of
them are just for informational purposes. One example would be Drive
Temperature. Another might be Power-On Hours (the length of time
the drive has been used since it was new, in hours).
First, make a backup copy of your important data from the failing
drive. After that you can try to find out what exactly happened
with the drive -- maybe it's not necessary yet to replace it. Sometimes
you only have a few hours. Other times the drive will keep working
properly for weeks or months. If your drive is sophisticated enough
to report detailed diagnostic information then Active SMART will
display it. Run Active SMART and it will show you any indications
of an upcoming S.M.A.R.T. failure.
 Download ActiveSMART and monitor your hard drive for S.M.A.R.T. failure
Look at the screenshot below:
This is a screenshot of Active SMART. In case of pending S.M.A.R.T.
drive failure, Active SMART shows your drive's problem.
Highlighted is a bad attribute - Raw Read Error Rate. This means,
that the drive surface is deteriorating, and the amount of errors
during reading has exceeded an acceptable number of errors. Brand
new drives can have errors, so that alone is not indicative of a
problem—new drives can compensate for a number of errors.
When the drive exceeds parameters determined by the factory, that’s
when you want Active SMART to warn you.
Active SMART highlights such attributes in red and shows the "BAD"
mark near its value. If you see attributes with "BAD"
marks, then something is going wrong with your drive. In this
event, make a backup of your important data to a different location
right away, and then contact Ariolic Technical
Support - sometimes we can give you a very good indication of
whether your disk will last for hours, days, or even weeks. If all
attributes are listed with an "OK"
status - very likely your hard drive is also OK.
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