S.M.A.R.T., spin-up time and IDE woes

I have an ECS 671T-M that I got because it was cheap. My main hard drive is an IDE Samsung 80GB and my main optical is a Lite-On CD-RW/DVD combo. It's ancient technology because I got a good deal on the CPU/motherboard and was too cheap to buy new drives to go with.

But for whatever reason, I had a really hard time configuring all this to work together. I had to swap cables, switch drives, mess with jumpers, etc. before it would even recognize that I had plugged in drives at all. When I finally got it all working, the hard drive's SMART is reporting a spin-up time of 1 (very bad, apparently) and urging me to backup and replace immediately. The health is reported as zero percent. Nonetheless, everything seems to work fine.

All of this seems to somehow be linked to the optical drive. I can replace it with any other drive and everything is recognized by the motherboard with no fuss, no jumper fiddling, nothing. The SMART problems go away and all is well in the land. But I need a DVD drive, and I'm too cheap to go buy a new one.

Any ideas, folks? What's wrong here? Will my hard drive actually fail?

Install HD Tune. With just the hard drive connected, go to the health tab, and copy down the actual SMART parameters.

While you are at it, run the benchmarks on your drive with and without the DVD connected too.

Then connect the DVD drive and check the parameters again. If they change, then you are prolly OK. There is just some conflict on the bus that is slowing the start up of your hard drive causing the smart alarm to trip.

If possible, you should run your hard drive and DVD drive on separate cables. Your MOBO should have 2 IDE connectors to make this possible. If it is on another cable already, then you will have to live with it until you can afford another DVD drive.

Don