Failed Smart Short Shelf Test

[jerryw242]

Two years ago, the monthly automatic Hardware Diagnostic Tools Test on my now 8 year old Compaq desktop indicated that the Smart Short Shelf Test had failed. (Error code: HD521-2W). I checked out what it meant and was warned that it indicated that my hard drive was in imminent danger of failing, to be sure I had a new hard drive available and to make sure my backup was up to date.

Now it's two years later and nothing has happened. No failure, no performance problems. Is it possible that this was a false alarm? Or am I playing with fire?

 

[johnb35]

What I would do is figure out what brand of drive it is and run the drive makers disk diagnostic utility on it. Don't trust any software HP may use. What brand of drive is it?

 

[JaredDM]

SMART can be a tricky and unreliable thing. Sometimes, a temporary glitch can trigger a SMART failure when the drive is actually fine. Many of the SMART attributes are actually just counting down things like power on hours, and power on cycles, which may not even have any real correlation with likelihood of failure. The SMART attributes you really need to watch out for are reallocated sectors and pending sectors, as those are generally a warning sign of imminent failure.

I'd try checking it using a program called Crystal Disk Info to see what the SMART is actually showing.