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Why Am I The Last To Know About A Dying Hard Drive?

Several times in the past dozen years, I've had hard drives fail. There was a horrible run of data destruction caused by three IBM Deskstar 75GXP drives before I put them all out to pasture, but several other brands have bitten the dust as well. Usually the failure was gradual enough that I could recover any recent changes on the drive and replace it. But I can't thank Windows for raising the alarm about drive failures.

The first time I had a failing drive on XP in early 2002, the symptom was just a very long boot time. Once XP was up and running, there was no indication that anything was wrong. After a few of these mysteriously long boot times, I looked in the system event log and saw this message:

An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation

This particular system had two drives, and the second drive was indeed on its way to certain death. This seems like a pretty important thing to know, yet the only sign of it was a slow boot time and a message in the system event log.

I was reminded of this because a customer just had a similar experience. About six months ago, a friend of his had set up a RAID-0 array on his PC with two 250-GB drives, to get a total of 500 GB. The quick way to characterize RAID 0 is "double the speed and half the reliability." When your data depends on the continued health of two drives, you're dangling raw meat in the face of Murphy's Law. In this case, the symptoms were only some occasional mysterious pauses while the system was running, and one or two error dialogs that seemed totally unrelated to the hard drive. Today, the system event log delivered 30 or 40 error messages worth of bad news:

The device, \Device\Harddisk0\D, has a bad block.

These are the kind of error messages that deserve to be shown in big scary dialog boxes, accompanied by loud oogah-horn sounds. Yet XP quietly drops them in the system event log, where you wouldn't look unless you already thought something was wrong.

For about a decade, most drives have had a feature called S.M.A.R.T that is supposed to help detect drive failures. Unfortunately, the feature is often turned off by default and Windows doesn't seem to take advantage of it. I haven't had a drive fail under Vista, so perhaps it's better than XP at letting the user know when disaster is imminent. Have any of you ever gotten a clear message from Windows when a drive is failing?

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