(02/09/2010 01:18 PM)PSPkiller Wrote:  A while back I was given a laptop to repair. It seemed that the laptop had been dropped and the hard drive had died. A quick eBay later, it had a replacement drive and all was well.

So, a few days ago I got bored, dug the dead drive out and opened it up to see what state it was in. It seems that when the laptop was dropped the drive detected the fall, parked the read/write heads and shut down. But, when the laptop actually hit the floor the arm was pushed beyond its lower limit meaning when the drive was powered up again the arm couldn't move back onto the disk. Seeing as the drive was dead and there was nothing to lose I moved the arm back to its normal parked position on the disk, put all the casing back together and powered it up. It worked.

The drive is a Seagate Momentus 5400.5 160GB. I've checked it with CHKDSK and it's found no bad sectors and all the S.M.A.R.T. monitoring tools I have say the drive is in perfect condition. Do you think it would be worth me keeping the drive and using it day to day? Has anyone been in a similar situation who can comment on post-repair reliability? I'm tempted to buy a portable enclosure off eBay so I can use it as a portable hard drive. If it's likely to fail again though I won't bother.

Thoughts?