Window 7 reports my ST315005 41AS hard will fail imminently

[Alexoferith]

I have this ST315005 41AS hard drive for about a year. I use it as my 2nd drive for storage only. There is about 195 gb stuff on it. My C drive is a WD 1.5TB. All software are run from there. Oh, My Document is targeted to a folder in my 2nd drive. OS is Win 7 64bit ultimate. Since yesterday, I started to get this message saying that my 2nd drive has problem and ask me to back up as it is going to fail imminently. I have managed to back up everything today. I have already deleted the partition and created a new one. Formatted it and put back the files. While this was being done, the same message shows up again. This make me worried. I haven't run the "Check" yet. Any suggestion before I do it? Many thanks in advance.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

If it says the drive is likely to fail imminently, this means not a partition level failure. We're talking unable to read anything on the drive; a reformat won't fix it.

Send the drive back to seagate under warranty.

You should always have a good backup; any data that only exists on one drive might as well not exist at all.

 

[Alexoferith]

Thank you very much for your help. After I post my message here, it showed quite a few similar calls before. One of them, the English wasn't very clear but the user seemed to be saying that the message went away when he changed the "port". I am guessing that he meant how the hard drive is connected to the motherboard. I think my two hard drives are in serial connecting to the same SATA connector on the motherboard. I will separate them when I get home after work today and see if that works. Any comment on this one? The two drives are the same size but different make. I am surprised that different firmware can cause such problem if that's the case.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

I doubt it's a software/firmware issue.

Failing drive usually means failing drive, though there can be other things.

I wouldn't trust any drive if it's triggered SMART warnings; send it back for a replacement.

 

[Alexoferith]

Update: Nothing wrong with the drive. It was the SATA port being faulty.. Didn't expect that. Must be the stress caused by the cable. So, for all lazy builders like me, please spend more thoughts on tidying the cable.