This drive has a hardware problem that cannot be repaired.

I have 4 drives in my Mac Pro...in bay 2, I have a Western Digital 750 gb drive I got just about 3 years ago.

The drive has been slightly problematic lately...like I'll be browsing through Finder and I'll get an error when going into certain folders...my iTunes library is on the drive and lately songs have been skipping etc.

I looked in disk utility just now and it says "the drive has a hardware problem that cannot be repaired" and says S.M.A.R.T. status failed.

I don't mind replacing the drive, EXCEPT...

I previously had a raptor in this same bay and the raptor failed a few months ago after a couple years in service. I tried moving the raptor to another bay, also tried it in an enclosure- nothing- the raptor died.

Is it possible this particular bay is causing problems, or no, there is no way a particular bay can be causing hard drives to fail? Like the bay can't be sending too much voltage or whatever (I have no idea)? Is it just pure coincidence that two drives in the same bay failed (first the raptor, then this one I moved into bay 2)?

fiatlux said:

There could be a problem with the bay, but generally speaking, having a drive failing after two or three years is not abnormal.

Drives are cheap, replace them as soon as they show signs of failure and don't look back. Best is if they fail before the end of the warranty, so that you can get a free replacement. You should have backups of course.

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Another strange thing, I just put this drive in a usb enclosure and it's working fine, transferring files I wasn't able to before that gave errors in finder. Of course it can't check SMART status, but what do you make of that?

fiatlux said:

I have had problems with drives that were due to loose connections, but this never led to SMART failures. I think that as soon as you have a SMART warning, you should no longer trust and use the HDD.

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Right, I'm going to replace the drive but you don't think there's anyway the bay itself could be bad and is ruining my drives? Isn't it a strange coincidence that this happened to two drives in the same bay? Or no, not really that strange at all?

Edit: Also, running 'verify drive' in disk utility works fine and shows no problems when connected over usb. Connected via sata though in that drive bay, disk utility can't even unmount the drive.

Fishrrman said:

"Right, I'm going to replace the drive but you don't think there's anyway the bay itself could be bad and is ruining my drives? Isn't it a strange coincidence that this happened to two drives in the same bay? Or no, not really that strange at all?"

Could the connecting cable from the motherboard to that particular drive bay be defective?

Suggestion:
Take the "problem" drive, and put it into ANOTHER bay of the MacPro. What does Disk Utility say about it now?

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Yeah, it failed smart again, so I replaced it today.

Only thing is now I seem to have lost my startup chime? When I first booted up with the new drive in there (which is the same seagate model that is my boot drive), I got a flashing folder with a question mark. Turned off the mac, then turned it back on, got into OS X, formatted it in disk utility, and now when I reboot again I still don't have the startup chime?

What would be causing the missing startup chime now?