HDD failure

On Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:09:57 -0800 (PST), rowan194 put finger to keyboard and composed:

My 13GB Seagate drive reported 119 reallocated sectors just before I took it out of service (because it was growing new defects on a weekly basis):

formatting link

Its S.M.A.R.T. status was still OK.

I think the figure of 99 you are referring to may be the "normalised" value, not the raw value. I believe my 13GB drive would have been allowed to develop several thousand bad sectors before its S.M.A.R.T. status would have been reported as bad.

- Franc Zabkar

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Franc Zabkar
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On Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:18:47 -0800 (PST), rowan194 put finger to keyboard and composed:

That's what I thought, but when I checked the expiry date of the warranty of my replacement drive on the Seagate web site, it was the full 5 years. The original drive was about a year old, so if that's a mistake, then I'm lucky. AFAIK the drive was replaced with a new one from Synnex stock, so maybe that accounts for it. BTW I purchased the original drive at a computer market and was directed to Synnex by the Seagate web site.

- Franc Zabkar

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Franc Zabkar

99 was the value reported by Seatools during an extended test - and it increased from 0 during the test - so I presume it's a count of sectors with unrecoverable errors during that scan, rather than sectors which have been quietly reallocated by the firmware. The likely reason S.M.A.R.T. didn't kick in is because it happened very suddenly. Things were fine then suddenly I could see my HD light getting "stuck" as if it was having problems reading from a drive. Unfortunately my RAID software does not provide any diagnostic tools to show which particular drive is playing up, so the only choice I have is to drop into DOS and run Seatools on all drives. Takes a while when you have over 2 billion total sectors to scan.......
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rowan194

Here's the diagnostics on the dud reconditioned drive that Seagate sent me

formatting link

Short test FAILS, long test finds 80 errors but is able to remap them and therefore SUCCEEDS, a subsequent short test FAILS

Shortly after this I rebooted and the drive reported a S.M.A.R.T. event.

Note "POH 1" which means it's only been powered on for a total of 1 hour! (Not entirely true, since it's a reconditioned drive the mechanicals could have been run for who knows how long. The firmware was just reset to 0)

This was a replacement for a faulty drive and it turned out to be even worse... may as well have just kept the first one...

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rowan194

On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 03:36:51 -0800 (PST), rowan194 put finger to keyboard and composed:

You might like to try smartctl:

formatting link

Here is the log for my 13GB Seagate drive:

formatting link

- Franc Zabkar

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Franc Zabkar

Yeah, I'm aware of smartctl, but unfortunately the Windows RAID driver presents the array as a single SCSI drive. Have tried many diagnostic utils with the same result. It's likely that even in another OS (such as *nix) there may still be issues with detecting and reporting data for individual drives. The only other thing I can think of is to buy a standalone PCI SATA card and selectively swap drives between the onboard RAID and the standalone SATA controller, but doing so will invalidate/degrade the array, requiring rebuilding between each drive swap. May as well just do the Seatools tests...

On my FreeBSD servers I'm moving over to software RAID1, which has the advantage that every HD util can still see the individual drives. I've run smartctl there. (Easy to see if a webhost is using second hand drives!)

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rowan194

On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:22:15 -0800 (PST), rowan194 put finger to keyboard and composed:

If you drop back to DOS, then you could try SMARTUDM. It reports raw SMART attributes. You may not need to run a complete Seatools diagnostic. In any case, if the bad sectors have already been reallocated, then there'll be nothing for Seatools to report.

See

formatting link

SMARTUDM is claimed to support "external UDMA/SATA/RAID controllers (HPT/Promise/FastTrack)".

- Franc Zabkar

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