I purchased a 1Tb Seagate Go drive a few months ago. It's formatted as NTFS. Today I started getting reports from smartd that the disk is failing. Specifically it's telling me that there are many bad sectors. There are no messages in /var/log/messages indicating any failures. Why is smartd claiming the disk is bad? This is the second drive (also a Seagate Go) that I get reports that the drive is failing less than a year after buying the drive. I can't believe that a drive would go bad after a few months use. I have other Seagate drives that have been in use for years without any issues. The problem seems to be specific to drives that are powered via USB.
Any assistance in the matter is appreciated.
Paolo
On 04/25/11 17:36, Paolo Galtieri wrote:
I purchased a 1Tb Seagate Go drive a few months ago. It's formatted as NTFS. Today I started getting reports from smartd that the disk is failing. Specifically it's telling me that there are many bad sectors. There are no messages in /var/log/messages indicating any failures. Why is smartd claiming the disk is bad? This is the second drive (also a Seagate Go) that I get reports that the drive is failing less than a year after buying the drive. I can't believe that a drive would go bad after a few months use. I have other Seagate drives that have been in use for years without any issues. The problem seems to be specific to drives that are powered via USB.
Any assistance in the matter is appreciated.
Paolo
The worst problem with these drives is that they are not ventilated, so they do get hot in that tiny enclosure. The second problem is that these external drives DO receive lots of accidental tips, shakes (hitting the table accidentally with your chair's armrests, or bumping bumping the table with your foot....etc.). That makes them very unreliable. I do have an external 1.5TB drive. It has a 3 inch fan that keeps it as cool as a cucumber. I have not had any problems with it at all.
On 04/25/11 17:45, JD wrote:
On 04/25/11 17:36, Paolo Galtieri wrote:
I purchased a 1Tb Seagate Go drive a few months ago. It's formatted as NTFS. Today I started getting reports from smartd that the disk is failing. Specifically it's telling me that there are many bad sectors. There are no messages in /var/log/messages indicating any failures. Why is smartd claiming the disk is bad? This is the second drive (also a Seagate Go) that I get reports that the drive is failing less than a year after buying the drive. I can't believe that a drive would go bad after a few months use. I have other Seagate drives that have been in use for years without any issues. The problem seems to be specific to drives that are powered via USB.
Any assistance in the matter is appreciated.
Paolo
The worst problem with these drives is that they are not ventilated, so they do get hot in that tiny enclosure. The second problem is that these external drives DO receive lots of accidental tips, shakes (hitting the table accidentally with your chair's armrests, or bumping bumping the table with your foot....etc.). That makes them very unreliable. I do have an external 1.5TB drive. It has a 3 inch fan that keeps it as cool as a cucumber. I have not had any problems with it at all.
I also have 2 other external drives (both 1.5Tb) that work just fine. In fact they sit right next to the Seagate Go drive. What's interesting is that when I boot to Win 7 and test the drive Windows says there are no problems (of course it is Windows so I don't necessarily trust what it tells me). I've had drives fail, but usually this is accompanied by obvious problems such as corrupted files and there tends to be kernel messages in /var/log/messages.
At this point I'm not sure what to do.
Paolo
On 04/25/11 18:11, Paolo Galtieri wrote:
On 04/25/11 17:45, JD wrote:
On 04/25/11 17:36, Paolo Galtieri wrote:
I purchased a 1Tb Seagate Go drive a few months ago. It's formatted as NTFS. Today I started getting reports from smartd that the disk is failing. Specifically it's telling me that there are many bad sectors. There are no messages in /var/log/messages indicating any failures. Why is smartd claiming the disk is bad? This is the second drive (also a Seagate Go) that I get reports that the drive is failing less than a year after buying the drive. I can't believe that a drive would go bad after a few months use. I have other Seagate drives that have been in use for years without any issues. The problem seems to be specific to drives that are powered via USB.
Any assistance in the matter is appreciated.
Paolo
The worst problem with these drives is that they are not ventilated, so they do get hot in that tiny enclosure. The second problem is that these external drives DO receive lots of accidental tips, shakes (hitting the table accidentally with your chair's armrests, or bumping bumping the table with your foot....etc.). That makes them very unreliable. I do have an external 1.5TB drive. It has a 3 inch fan that keeps it as cool as a cucumber. I have not had any problems with it at all.
I also have 2 other external drives (both 1.5Tb) that work just fine. In fact they sit right next to the Seagate Go drive. What's interesting is that when I boot to Win 7 and test the drive Windows says there are no problems (of course it is Windows so I don't necessarily trust what it tells me). I've had drives fail, but usually this is accompanied by obvious problems such as corrupted files and there tends to be kernel messages in /var/log/messages.
At this point I'm not sure what to do.
Paolo
Seagate has a utility which will test your drive. It will also destroy your data :) What you can do is call Seagate's support and ask for an RMA . Also, if you have ANY sensitive data on the drive, I suggest you use the wipe utility to clean it thoroughly with multiple patterns. Since it is such a big drive, it could take days to finish, but well worth it. You could also use hdparm command to securely erase the drive. Time for you to bone up on hdparm and wipe.
Cheers,
JD
On 04/25/2011 08:11 PM, Paolo Galtieri wrote:
I also have 2 other external drives (both 1.5Tb) that work just fine. In fact they sit right next to the Seagate Go drive. What's interesting is that when I boot to Win 7 and test the drive Windows says there are no problems (of course it is Windows so I don't necessarily trust what it tells me). I've had drives fail, but usually this is accompanied by obvious problems such as corrupted files and there tends to be kernel messages in /var/log/messages.
At this point I'm not sure what to do.
Paolo
substitute the sda by the device reported by smartd in the following line:
smartctl -a /dev/sda | less
there look for the lines:
- SMART overall-health self-assessment test result
if the result is FAILED, I recommend replace your disk
- Reallocated_Sector_Ct - Reallocated_Event_Count - Current_Pending_Sector
if the last column of the above lines aren't zero, well sometimes some sectors cannot read/write anymore so the disk remaps them with spare sectors,
so a disk with bad sectors can work normally, but if the disk runs out from spare sectors well at that moment the disk is bad
Gabriel
On Mon, 2011-04-25 at 20:54 -0500, Gabriel Ramirez wrote:
so a disk with bad sectors can work normally, but if the disk runs out from spare sectors well at that moment the disk is bad
Are "spare sectors" special areas of the drive, or merely any space that you haven't saved data to?
On 04/26/2011 06:49 PM, Tim wrote:
On Mon, 2011-04-25 at 20:54 -0500, Gabriel Ramirez wrote:
so a disk with bad sectors can work normally, but if the disk runs out from spare sectors well at that moment the disk is bad
Are "spare sectors" special areas of the drive, or merely any space that you haven't saved data to?
when the hard disk makes the remap by itself, the new sector came from reserved sectors from the factory more info in second paragraph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_sector
Gabriel
On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 5:36 PM, Paolo Galtieri wrote:
I can't believe that a drive would go bad after a few months use. I have other Seagate drives that have been in use for years without any issues.
You should be aware that there is a certain firmware revision of Seagate drives that has serious problems. *All* of my 7200.11 drives have failed. Every one of them. I'm not kidding. I've not had any issues with the 7200.12 drives.
If you can get eyes on the drive itself or otherwise check the firmware version and discover any .11 drives, destroy them with prejudice.
-Alan
On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 2:20 AM, Alan Evans ame.fedora@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 5:36 PM, Paolo Galtieri wrote:
I can't believe that a drive would go bad after a few months use. I have other Seagate drives that have been in use for years without any issues.
You should be aware that there is a certain firmware revision of Seagate drives that has serious problems. *All* of my 7200.11 drives have failed. Every one of them. I'm not kidding. I've not had any issues with the 7200.12 drives.
If you can get eyes on the drive itself or otherwise check the firmware version and discover any .11 drives, destroy them with prejudice.
I can corroborate. I've had to RMA my 7200.11 3 times. I'm on my 4th drive. At least it came with a 5 year warranty...
Fortunately it was only used for MythTV recordings so although we missed a few shows each time nothing serious was ever lost.
Richard
Alan Evans wrote:
I've not had any issues with the 7200.12 drives.
Those models are just as bad. I went through three 7200.12 1TB drives in a few months. Seagate would only ship me refurbished drives as replacements and refused to send me a new drive.
The drives were in a well ventilated case, and they never rose above 40 C under load.
I have since sold or destroyed the 7200.12 drives as the replacements continued to exhibit odd behavior.
On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 6:51 AM, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
Alan Evans wrote:
I've not had any issues with the 7200.12 drives.
Those models are just as bad. I went through three 7200.12 1TB drives in a few months.
Well that's not good to hear.
Fortunately, I've only got a couple of them deployed. I mostly switched to Western Digital as I watched the stack of bricked Seagates accumulate on my desk. Then I noticed that every failed drive was a .11...
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Alan Evans -
Gabriel Ramirez -
JD -
Michael Cronenworth -
Paolo Galtieri -
Richard Shaw -
Tim