How serious are these hard drive errors?

[azkiwi]

I recently started using HDD Health to monitor my hard drives after I heard some clicking that I feared was an imminent failure. I haven't heard the noise any more (am now wondering if it was a floppy drive) but I am get some errors reported on a Seagate ST380013A that is only a couple of months old.

The errors are; Raw Read Error Rate changes (x3), a Power On Hour Count Change and an a out of spec temperature increase. I have no idea if these are normal or indicators of impending doom. HDD Health is new to me and its freeware...

I think this drive is my WINNT drive but its hard to say - I have 3 80GB HDDs. How do you match logical drives with physical drives? Just clicking on drive properties is ambiguous.

 

[stu1811]

Is that error from the SMART monitoring? Any errors coming from SMART means its time to RMA the drive.

 

[azkiwi]

Yes it is a SMART error. But here's the rub - I just d/l ed a diagnostic from Seagate and it reports no SMART errors.

Not sure how this program can detect 5 errors today yet Seagate says none! Methinks that may make an RMA difficult to get...

Thanks for your reply.

 

[wpshooter]

Did you run an indepth diagnostic of the hard drive using the Seagate software or did you just do a quick/short diagnostic ?

P.S - Is this a SATA model and is it 7200 RPM or better. If so, do you have cooling/air blowing across the drive ?

 

[azkiwi]

quick / short...

 

[wpshooter]

Do you have auxiliary cooling on the drive ?

Remember that when you are running the drive diagnostics, you are probably running these from either a floppy drive or CD drive and your system is probably not under the same stress and heating that it is under in normal operating conditions.

 

[azkiwi]

I ran the diagnostics on-line from Seatools, and it is my OS drive so the loads probably are equivalent. However it may need the long version to find errors.

HDD Health is recording a log and I thought that log was part of SMART and woudl be detected by SeaTools. Maybe not...

 

[azkiwi]

I ran the 20 minute version of the long self-test (again via Seagate on-line) no errors

 

[savvy]

Virus perhaps?

 

[azkiwi]

I am fairly armed to the teeth against same; router firewall, Sygate, AVG etc and I have done a Spybot S&D search for virus /spyware and the drive is only a few months old, but I guess these days, nothing is 100%. How can you ever be sure?