SMART event. Should I be worried?

[Volante]

I've looked at all the info given so far, and done a little basic research - I read that Western Digital have a known fault that registers their hard drive temperature up to 20ºC higher than it actually is; and when I installed the HD tune software, it told me that my hard drive was running at 68ºC which as I understand it is phenomenally hot. There is no way it was actually this temperature, because I doubt I'd be able to touch it let alone have it on my lap - so might it be reasonable to assume that the SMART event was something to do with that?

On Wikipedia it mentions something about Airflow Temperature on Western Digital HD's being an 'attribute', and if the threshold was broken it would come up as a SMART event (as I understand it) though I have to admit that even reading this information twice through hasn't helped me work out if this was the case. For someone who only began using computers comparatively recently to most it seems a minefield, and though I think I pretty much understand the way it works, I'm no closer to working out what actually went wrong.

I ran the HD Tune error scan, and the entire thing came up clean with no errors or anomalies; so at present with reading about the factory fault in Western Digital HD's and with the clean bill of health from every diagnostic program I could find I'm slightly more confident about the situation.
I think I'm on the right track here, but any confirmation from someone a little more knowledgeable would be extremely welcome.

Cheers.

Addition:

You can listen to what i stated or you can choose to ignore it...
It's up to you.
SMART warnings  are rarely wrong.
You decide.

I'm not ignoring what you say whatsoever, I'm asking for clarification. Unfortunately, I'm of the ilk that doesn't just accept things without them being backed up by information, and just because I'm ignorant for the most part when it comes to technology that doesn't mean I lose my sense of reason and rationale. As much as I appreciate your help, "There is a reason" just doesn't cut it in order for me to rest easy on the subject.
Thanks for commenting though. Every little helps.

[patio]

Fair enough...
I hope you have your data backed up to a reliable media...

[BC_Programmer]

The reason is one of the SMART attributes exceeded their threshold.

I might add that this message is coming directly from the drive; SMART is a technology designed to detect impending hard drive failure by monitoring critical attributes, such as the number of corrected read errors, seek times, etc.


The hard drive temp of 68 degrees is normal. In general Hard drives, especially 7200 RPM and faster drives, can get as hot or hotter then a CPU. And you would be able to have it in your lap because the hard drive is inside the laptop, usually in a corner.... and 68 degrees isn't too hot to touch.


Additionally I might add that a virus cannot "spoof" SMART values... they are coming directly from hardware. However S.M.A.R.T monitoring is a warning that some critical property has exceeded a tolerable range. Can you determine what property that is?

[patio]

On top of that i don't believe SMART does thermal monitoring anyways...