smartd reporting disk failing

[Paolo Galtieri]

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