smartd reporting disk failing

[JD]

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