I have an Acer Extensa 4620z laptop with a 143GB SATA hard drive. The serial number I believe is WDC WD1600BEVS-22RST0-(S1). I've experienced systems freezes, and I'm afraid it's a sign of a hard drive going bad.

At first, I had Hardy Heron installed on this laptop and I've experienced a time when the entire system just freezes/locks up and the cursor won't move when I wiggle the mouse. Also, any music I had playing just replays as if it's stuck in an infinite loop. An example is when I'm playing a song like "Blah Yeah! Blah Yeah! Bl-bl-bl-bl-bl-bl-bl" and that just goes on. The only thing I can do is to hard reset. After the laptop shuts down, I press the power button again and the system comes up just fine. It's only happened on Hardy Heron about 3 times total within about a month's time.

This is a bit off topic, but I updated to Intrepid Ibex and I just couldn't stand it because of the performance issue. Everything ran slower even though I KNOW I had plenty of memory (2GB with Pentium Dual Core). But back to the subject; the system froze 2 times, within 20 minutes! That drove me over the edge to switch back. This usually happens when I'm either using the computer on an average basis, or when I just have a media player playing (Audacious) music and just Nautilus open for music. So today I reformatted and installed and went back to Hardy Heron, and everything seems to be perfectly fine.

Is this a sign of a hard drive failure coming? I have all of my data (pictures, text files, etc.) backed up on a flash drive, and my music on my iPod, so I'm prepared for a storm, if any.

Post the output of:

where /dev/sda is the device node for that HDD. This will only work if you have SMART enabled in the BIOS and compatible HDD. If you want you can also run a test using smartctl as follows:

it will tell you to wait until the test is finished, just don't turn off the computer until it finishes.

I suggest check the logs. They are located in /var/log.

I think it is more about power saving issue. Probably irqbalance is set in the kernel. The irqbalance feature might be causing freezes and jitter performance. It happens on my setup if irqbalance is set in the kernel or the irqbalance is running as an external program.

SMART is usually dumb when it thinks the drive is going. IMHO, noise is a better factor when the drive is about to fail. Louder it gets, chances are is the drive is going. If it takes a long time to find data, there is a chance you have a high sector corruption count and this relates to just data corruption over time.

A better way than running SMART is using the hard drive utility from the hard drive manufacture. Go to Western Digital to get the utility. It should give information about the condition of the hard drive.

There are some cases that a BIOS update might be needed.

Other cases is some modules or drivers might be causing some problems that might be only related to GUI. Configure OpenSSH and try logging into the computer when it freezes.

BTW, You get what you paid for with Acer products.

I have no clue what you are talking about with the irqbalance of the kernel.

The only noises I really hear are things like minor shifting. I hear these "shiftings" when a song ends and a new one plays, but it's not after EVERY song.

I don't notice anything related to files taking ages to open, though. Like you said, it probably could just be an issue with the power saving.