I have a rather interesting problem. I have a 750GB Seagate Barricuda hard drive that for the past year or so has been causing my PC problems. Sometimes it would get rather extreme and cause my PC to restart several times a day for a while, then after a bit of fiddling, it would be OK for a few weeks. When the hard drive conks out, the BIOS forgets entirely that it is there. Resetting doesn't help, only actually physically switching off the PC and switching it back on causes the drive to be recognised by the BIOS.

I'd been racking my brains as to what the problem may be. The problem came to a head yesterday when I spontaneously decided to go out and buy a new 2TB drive and reinstall Windows 7, Windows XP and Ubuntu 12.04 on it. Works beautifully, no crashes so far. I've reconnected the old one to get my steamapps folder and game saves off it and the BIOS is still forgetting it from time to time - Windows is handling it as a drive that has been incorrectly unmounted.

It's not the SATA cable, as I've switched them around. It's not the PSU, as I've just replaced it (my old PSU did waver and was struggling with my graphics card, that was a different problem altogether). It's not the motherboard or SATA interfaces, as everything's fine except for this one hard drive - besides the 2TB drive, I also have a SATA Bluray drive, a SATA 500GB drive and an IDE 200GB drive.. By process of deduction, it must be the drive itself.

But given that the drive is barely three years old, I'm struggling to figure out why it's doing this and I can't shake the feeling that it's a problem that can be solved. It does have a few bad sectors - the SMART data verifies this - but that wouldn't explain the sudden "dying" every so often. Funnily enough, a BIOS update has just alleviated the problem, but not fixed it (instead of conking out after five minutes, it now takes a couple of hours again).

Could this be some kind of wobbly wire contact in the hard drive?

This sounds very familiar. It's probably the drive. One of the big killers of HDDs is bad power. If you've had issues with your PSU in the past, the HDD is probably one of the first places that you'd see that showing up.

I do know from personal experience that HDDs can causing the computer to momentarily freeze sometimes when they're dieing. I think the main time I remember that was from when the spindle motor on one of my disks was going.

That being said, obviously, get all your data off the drive as soon as possible and immediately dispose of it in the appropriate fashion. Write random 1s and 0s to the entire surface and drop it off for recycling.

It could probably be a bad connection, I've seen that as well when I had a disk not located in my case sometimes that would cause temporary freezes. But once you have reason to suspect that a disk is going south, the only appropriate action is to retire it. Your data is almost certainly worth more than the disk. And if it isn't, your time is.

I doubt it is the problem but I would spend a couple of bucks and replace the CMOS battery just to eliminate it. Clean the battery and contacts at the least . . . =)

What hedwards says ^^^ Age matters... and it doesn't matter. Stuff will break at one point or another; for your drive that point is sooner rather than later. This is just to say that one should not dis-count any particular item just because it's newer than some other hardware. or that it hasn't reached the end of its generally-perceived lifecycle.

All true, very true, although the odd thing was that the hard drive problems started BEFORE the PSU problems. Still, as we say - "hope is the last thing to die". There might be something to this actually. I've had the BIOS forget my rather idiosyncratic boot sequence occasionally of late and try to boot the IDE drive (which is first in the hardware sequence), so it's quite possible that it does need replacing. And when I flashed the BIOS, I had a massive headache trying to get the CMOS settings reset without a PS/2 keyboard.

That's a new one. Didn't realise hard disks had upgradable firmwire. Will give that a crack, thanks :)

Right, the most commonly given figure is just an estimate of how long before half the drives have failed. Google did some experiments a few years back and found that by and large all HDDs are equal in terms of expected life. Now, there will be bad batches from time to time, but buying the cheapest drives is usually the wisest choice as there's no particular benefit in terms of reliability to the more expensive ones.

Of course, that only applies within a given category, SCSI and Fibrechannel have a few extra features that are sometimes worth it like NCQ, But that doesn't increase the life of the drive.

Holy mother of God...that was precisely the fix I needed. The changelog actually referenced the problem I described and since I updated the firmware yesetday, the drive hasn't thrown out once.

Thanks!