[Naffer]

So I purchased a 160GB Seagate PATA 8MB drive a few days ago to replace a Maxtor that mysteriously failed on me in less then a week. When I fired up my favorite hardware monitoring program, it reported that my brand new Seagate drive was not as healthy as it should be. The values that interest me the most are the "Raw read error rate" and "Seek Error Rate" The "Worst" values haven't changed any in recent days, but should I be concerned for the health of this drive?

[uart]

Hi Naffer. As disconcerting as it may be I can assure you that those values are quite typical for that drive. I've used dozens of cuda'a and 7200.7's and they've all had really horrid looking figures for Raw Read Error Rate and Seek Error Rate.

It seems to just be something about the way Seagate implements its SAMRT values. I've had Seagate drives with bad looking values like that (and worse) chugging away for over two years now, so it doesn't seem to indicate impending failure or anything.

The main thing I look out for is the "Reallocated Sector Count". If that raw value ever starts increasing steadily then that's when you really are in bad shape.

BTW. Just one thing that is a bit of concern with your posted SMART's is the drives maximum temperature or 55C, that's a bit hot. That's the one good thing about Seagates SMART reporting, they show you both the current temperature and the worst temperature that the drive has ever reached. Many other drive types only show you the drives currrent temperature.

[Naffer]

Thanks, I was hoping for a response like that. I've got two other identical (except SATA) drives that I'm not able to access the smart data for because they're tied up in a RAID0 array. This drive was partly for storage, but mostly so I would have enough space to break the array without losing any data. I wanted to make sure that the drive was ok before I put vital data onto it. The maxtor it replaced died in only 6 days, taking my whole music collection with it. (Reallocated sector count went nuts) The temperature is something I'm familiar with, but I'm not quite sure what to do about it at the moment. The case is properly vented, but my room is small and gets quite warm after a long session of gaming. There are 4 harddrives crammed in front of the mid tower with a couple cheap intake fans in front. I'm going to have to work out something else because they're just way too hot for my own personal comfort. That Seagate drive gets within 5C of its maximum operating temperature after hours of gaming. That makes me nervous.

[bubbadawg]

I have the exact same drive and have been monitoring it with Speedfan as well. Well, last night I noticed that my values in the SMART section look almost identical to yours. I started panicking and move data off the drive. I tested the drive with Seagate's tools and it checked out fine. I called them and they said that I should not go by the data in 3rd party monitoring apps only their program.

Hope that helps, I know that seeing another individual with the same issues makes me feel a little better about the situation.

[boehmb]

All my Seagate's have the exact same SMART results with Speedfan and AIDA32. They have been operating perfectly for well over a year that way.