Seagate Drive Problems???

[veldthui]

I purchased 2 Seagate ST32000641AS drives. These are 2TB drives giving 4TB all up.

They are S.M.A.R.T enabled drives and as such I installed monitoring software to check up on them from time to time . I am concerned that both of these drives are showing indication of failure already. Normally I just use 1 program to check but I have tried with 3 different ones and they all show the health of both drives, one at 40% and the other at 32%.

One drive is showing Surface Read Error Rate at 80% health and Controller Hardware ECC Recovered at 32. The other drive is showing Surface Read Error Rate at 67%, Surface Seek error rate at 51%, and Controller Hardware ECC Recovered at 40%.

Have I got reason to be worried as these drives are only about 3 to 4 months in use. It is not showing any physical problem except that it is the slowest part of my PC rating at only 5.9 on the Windows Experience Test.

 

[Petey7]

Download and run SeaTools, Seagate's diagnostic software. If that says there are major problems, I'd look into RMAing the drives. I've heard in the past that Seagates higher capacity drives have a higher fail rate.

 

[veldthui]

Well I tried SeaTools and it passes all its tests. However I am still concerned about the SMART data. All my drives I have checked previously except one have all shown 100%. The one that did not show 100% failed about 6 months later and was replaced.

 

[karlsnooks]

I know that it will take a dreadully long time on a disk of that size but have you tried running CHKDSK? Run it with the /R option.

 

[Mellon Head]

I've heard in the past that Seagates higher capacity drives have a higher fail rate.

That's true of the large format 7200.11 drives. There were controller issues. I was under the impression that they had fixed that in the drives that are 1 TB and above. I was planning to get a couple of 1 TB Seagates next week on sale. Maybe I'll have to wait for some WD drives to go on sale...

 

[Petey7]

I've heard in the past that Seagates higher capacity drives have a higher fail rate.

That's true of the large format 7200.11 drives. There were controller issues. I was under the impression that they had fixed that in the drives that are 1 TB and above. I was planning to get a couple of 1 TB Seagates next week on sale. Maybe I'll have to wait for some WD drives to go on sale...

I read it mostly when looking for a external HDD about 8 months ago. I can't guarantee the validity of the statements, just that I heard them. BTW, I got a 1TB Seagate external drive and the thing works great.

 

[veldthui]

I know that it will take a dreadully long time on a disk of that size but have you tried running CHKDSK? Run it with the /R option.

There is nothing wrong with the drive at the moment as the hardware looks to be taking care of any errors that occur (as it should). The stats just seem to indicate that it is getting out of hand for a brand new drive. Looking at info it says if the health gets down to 33% then the drives should be swapped out as they are close to failure (read data loss). One is 32% and the other is 51%. And still the seagate tools says the drive is fine but then I guess they don't want drives back that are still working.

 

[Mellon Head]

I read it mostly when looking for a external HDD about 8 months ago. I can't guarantee the validity of the statements, just that I heard them. BTW, I got a 1TB Seagate external drive and the thing works great.

We've had about 5 of them fail at work in a period of four months or so last fall. All 500 GB drives from the 7200.11 vintage. I was able to resurrect 3 of them with some sleight of hand, electronic tricks, and just good luck. Two of them have been going fine in my NAS now for over six months, and the other one is in my media PC. Not bad, considering they were in the garbage.

I don't know that I'd want to own one of that series without access to surface mount soldering equipment and test gear though...

 

[veldthui]

Well here is the reply from Seagate.

The SMART values that might be read out by the SMART software is not based on how the values are used within the Seagate hard drives.
Seagate uses the Seatools Diagnostic software to test the SMART values of the drive. Seagate does not support software programs that "read" SMART-values like the programs that you describe.
We use the pass or fail options. The individual values are proprietary therefore we do not have a utility that will read out the values. If the values that you are seeing with a third party SMART utility are not displaying properly or seem to be false, please contact your software vendor for further explanation of the values.

Makes you wonder why they put the values there at all then when they supposedly mean nothing. Personally I do not see what use SeaTools is any good for then. It will either pass the test or it will fail. If it fails you would have already seen the result of the failure on your drive by lost data or something else. The SMART values are supposed to be used to predict how much longer the drive will last but obviously not true with Seagate so why do they SMART enable their drives????