Today whilst using my PC I received the wonderful message: "Windows Disk Diagnostic detected a S.M.A.R.T. fault on disk ST31000528AS". 
 
This hard drive is dedicated to my Cakewalk Projects and it may well fail. I have a backup via a SyncToy scheduled task and am creating a second manual backup. Later I will be running chkdsk and seagate windows tools on it. 
 
If I do need a replacement, any recommendations beyond the standard 7,200rpm non-green drives?
 
My first choice was going to be something like: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-seagate-st2000dm001-barracuda-720014-sata-3-6gb-s-7200rpm-64mb-cache-8ms-oem-ncq 
 
~ Tony

This isn't an official endorsement, but I'm partial to Western Digital Blacks. I've run them into the ground and just RMA'd the failed units under warranty. It's never been an issue with WD. 

SMART errors are more detailed/granular than Windows reports, and some errors are more significant than others. It is possible for a drive temperature to be too high for example due to factors that will not recur if a ventilation fan is fixed or the drive is moved to another location, or the weather changes. Some other tools will give you a more specific look at the errors. The SeaTools for DOS will give you more accurate views of the surface than the Windows variety, as you can set it to do a read/write operation on the entire surface but at the cost of destroying all your data. As a general rule of thumb on a critical primary data drive, it is best to play it safe and replace the drive. A drive that passes all of your tests after triggering a SMART alert, is still more likely than one that has not to fail. If you really want to continue to use it, consider using it as a backup drive since you will still have at least one good copy on the primary drive, and it is unlikely that both will fail at the same time.
 
This suggests one of the options for looking at SMART data more closely:
http://www.howtogeek.com/134735/how-to-see-if-your-hard-drive-is-dying/
 
Read down to section 3.5 of this to see some data about the risk associated with various reports:
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf
 
 

Thanks for the advice.
 
I've ordered a 2TB Western Digital Black ordered from Scan and will arrive on Thursday. It's not worth risking it. My second backup is 78% complete, so all should be fine.
 
I mentioned in another post that I was experiencing dropouts and glitches, it's likely that this is the cause. 
 
Thanks again,
~ Tony

 I actually prefer WD Blues.  I have yet to RMA a Blue but Blacks so far it's 3.  Sure it's a better warranty but a drive bought from a vendor may show 3 years out of 5 left. Then you will have prove your purchase date.  All 3 of my Black drivers failed within the first 6 months.  Removing all of the data is a hassle and an inconvenience. 

kitekrazy1
All 3 of my Black drivers failed within the first 6 months.

Imagine the odds of that happening.  At the opposite end, I've never had a hard drive fail in 30 years.
I only stop using them when the interface changes.
 
I've been running three Blacks all day long for the last couple of years with no problems.
 

Whew, thanks for posting that... I have never had a drive fail in 30 years either and was beginning to feel weird by these posts.

I have seen drives in companies that ran 10-15 years non-stop and were finally taken out of commission when the machine was replaced.

I just bought and installed two new drives: a 1 TB rotational (7200) drive for projects and a 1 TB SSD for large sample libraries.  The SSD is a Samsung Pro.
 
I find spinning drives fine for projects but unusable for string and orchestral libraries and the SSD changed my life. The bad thing about the SSD is that it cost around $650 (ordered through Amazon) and it needed a bracket to fit the slot plus an extra cable.  (In fact, I had to use two brackets: one to convert 5.25" to 3.5" and another inside that to covert 3.5" to 2.5".  Hopefully you can find a single bracket solution.)  The brackets and cables are cheap and available at Tiger Direct and other places.
 
String libraries that were unusable before (because they stream from disc) work great now; and projects that use sample libraries load extremely fast.  Even libraries I could use before but that had slow load times are now on the SSD and productivity is way up.
 
Some say write time to an SSD is slower so I don't know if you would want it for projects.  I had not had enough write experience to validate that.  Transferring the libraries to the SsD went fairly fast, though, so I didn't notice a write speed issue.
 
In the past, I could cook and eat lunch while a Vienna Dimension Pro matrix was loading, and even after that, it didn't work well.  I had actually uninstalled Hollywood Strings because performance was so bad.
 
I know you specifically asked about projects but thought some of this may help you or others.  Even though they cost a lot, my next PC will have two 1 TB SSDs.
 
I also back up all projects to an external drive (e.g., Passport).

tonydude: back up your drive !  go here : http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/213891en
 
Update the firmware ! Barring that :Seagate Constellation ES.3 1TB 3.5" SATA 6GB/S 7200RPM OEM Hard Drive (ST1000NM0033)
 
Re-build the drive run smart again
 
ES being the drive quality level you should be using !

I just saw this news today and figured it would be worthwhile to post here: http://techreport.com/news/27697/latest-backblaze-reliability-data-shows-carnage-for-3tb-seagate-drives
 
Looks like the large size Seagates are leading the pack in failures.