Laptop HDD woes

I do quite a bit of international travelling and my old klunky Lenovo 3000N200 takes a few knocks and consequently I've had to purchase my 2nd HDD for this laptop in the past 3.5 years.


Last week my laptop hung for tens of seconds while logging in - and once more again today.  Looking at the kernel log I was able to see repeated time-outs on read errors which was a little alarming.   The palimpsest utility showed that I had a few bad sectors and there were a few pending to be remapped.   I had a quick look at the S.M.A.R.T. data using:

sudo smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda

..and saw that I'd got 5311 hours of use out of the drive and considering I bought it about 400 days ago works out to be ~13.25 hours of usage per day on average.  Peeking at  /sys/fs/ext4/sda*/lifetime_write_kbytes it appeared I had written 1.4TB of data, which works out to be 0.27GB of writes per hour of use on average - which sounds fair as my laptop is mainly used for Web, Email and the occasional bit of compilation (as I do most kernel builds on large servers).

So what do I replace it with?  Well, being a cheapskate, I did not want to splash out on an expensive SSD on this relatively old laptop (which I will palm off to my kids fairly soon), so I went for an spinny disk upgrade.  My original drive was a 160GB 5400rpm WD1600BEVT - this time I spent an extra £5 and got a 2500GB 7200rpm WD2500BEKT with double the internal cache and improved read performance - the postage was free from dabs.com so double win.