Concerned Seagate Owner

[mau108]

Well, I have a Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB which was affected by the firmware issue, so I upgraded all the way to SD1B. All is good, nothing wrong with the drive, all it is is my storage drive.

But installed that new app someone here posted to read my smart info and I am scared from the results...

http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/4920/seagatesmart.jpg
http://img22.imageshack.us/img22/8983/wdsmart.jpg

My older WD OS drive shows that it has 80% health status, my new seagate only has 55%!

For kicks I installed this app on my closet server which has been on almost 24/7, 365 for the past few years, the Maxtor 250GB ide drive in there shows that it has 91% health status. WTF!

[xxEIEIOxx]

I almost hate to jump in on the negativity about Seagate, but I just replaced all of my Seagate drives with Western Digitals. I had to of the 7200.10's with the AAK firmware that I replaced with a pair of the Caviar Blacks, and a pair of Momentus drives in my laptop with a pair of Scorpios. I am very pleased with the new drives. I wasn't caught up in this firmware issue, but with this and the crappy AAK that was on my 7200.10's I was determined I wasn't going to buy more Seagates. If yours fails RMA it and sell the replacement and get a WD or some other brand.

[mau108]

ya i have began doing a total backup of the drive on to optical media.... I may pick up a Hitachi or WD 1TB and RMA the seagate if this is enough of a reason too.....

edit: Another good thing is my seagate still falls under the 5 year warranty :) so I may just keep it till it completely craps out....

[jtg1993]

I didn't use Active Hard Disk Monitor but HDtune sorta showed the same things with a Seagate 7200.11 1TB. As you can see that drive has been on under 1hr and is showing read errors. I posted a thread on here about it and one of the users here has the same issue.
http://i520.photobucket.com/albums/w328/jojo122493/HDTune_Health_ST31000340AS.png

[dj LiTh]

I've been buying the samsung f1's lately and have been very happy (before only ever bought WD's and Seagates)

[AreEss]

Yes, you are seeing read errors.
These are not necessarily physical read errors. That is a very important point, and goes to why you should not buy any Seagate drive whatsoever at this point. These are electrically registered read errors, which can be caused by issues with the SATA interface. This is limited to the consumer drives, and may be caused by the "fix" firmware Seagate issued. There is also the possibility that these are from the firmware bug and the register was not cleared. I haven't been able to verify either way personally.

If someone has an un"fixed" Seagate drive, they can confirm this pretty easily. Just read the register on the unflashed drive, and see if they have errors. Flash the drive, and see if the value is the same immediately afterward. If it is, then it's not cleared. If it's changed after a few days, then there's an electrical issue introduced by the "fix."

Either way, Seagate is just flailing their arms about and throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. All of my 7200.10's have failed within 18 months at this point, and all of the 7200.11's have developed issues of some sort - electrical and mechanical. No, it's definitely not a statistically significant sampling. We're talking 22 7200.10's and 31 7200.11's. The fact that they're "unrelated" drives is pretty damning, though.

[Martel-fs]

Seagate drives commonly have bogus values for SMART attributes 1, 7, and 195. Those wouldn't bother me, but the 13 reallocated sectors (attribute 5) would.

[jtg1993]

Seagate drives commonly have bogus values for SMART attributes 1, 7, and 195. Those wouldn't bother me, but the 13 reallocated sectors (attribute 5) would.

The HDtune I showed earlier is my .11 1TB when it was new, well it now has 12 or 13 reallocated sectors and has been replaced with a WD 1TB GP. The .11 1TB will be going for RMA when I get around to it then sold when I get it back.