Seagate drive was replaced 6 months ago and I have bad sectors again!

[npolite]

I purchased a Seagate ST980825A 7200.1 80GB 7200 RPM 2.5" IDE drive back in Oct 2007. I started getting blue screens in December and localized them to bad sectors on the HD. I think they grew from 4 to about 11 before I sent the drive in. I got a replacement and it was fine up until today that I decided to run a HD Tune of the bad sectors. This time I got about 30 bad sectors. I am running SeaTools for the 2nd time about (60 Errors) to repair the sectors but it looks like they are unrepairable so the drive will have to be sent in again The original IBM drive was a 5400 RPM and I went to a 7200 RPM. The temp of the new drive usually runs between 32-35 degrees Celsius but can jump to 40-42 if I run scans from HD tune. Are these number high for a 2.5" HD? I have some old 3.5" Maxtor drives that have been running for years at 42C without any problems. The drive's power on time shows as 325 hr so there hasn't been much on it. I'm probably not going to insure this since it's probably not worth it but will send it back to get it replaced.


Update: I ran two checks using SeaTools and the error count went from 30 to 18. I then ran another check and it went down to 14. Should I continue to run the repair utility or just send the drive for RMA?

Thanks

 

[nickbits]

Send it back.

 

[RebateMonger]

In my experience, once a drive starts showning bad sectors, it's time to get a new drive.

 

[California Roll]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
In my experience, once a drive starts showning bad sectors, it's time to get a new drive.

Agree, first sign of bad sectors and send it back. Yours is still under warranty.

 

[npolite]

Thanks everyone for your help. I've sent the drive back. I've always thought that once you get these you have a bad drive, I'm wondering why Seagate has a utility to repair them?

Also I got this drive the 2nd week in March not in Jan...this is not good...I wonder If these drives are similar to the 7200.11 series. If this happens again in 3 months, I'm going to ask that they send me a different series drive.

 

[hclarkjr]

or you could buy a western digital black drive

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: npolite
Thanks everyone for your help. I've sent the drive back. I've always thought that once you get these you have a bad drive, I'm wondering why Seagate has a utility to repair them?

Recently, I put together a "junker" Windows 7 machine, just to play videos. Not caring much about it, I "fixed" a Seagate 7200.7 drive that had reported bad sectors. Then I installed W7.

One day after the fix, it was reporting MORE bad sectors.

 

[npolite]

Originally posted by: hclarkjr
or you could buy a western digital black drive

Yeah my next drives will probably be WD. I just had bad memories of WD back in the 90's similar to what I am seein with Seagate now. I wish WD would be more competative with their transfer rates since it seems Segate always comes up on top. The thing is that I have a 7200.11 250GB drive and it has been great (knock on wood so far) running on almost a year now.

 

[QueBert]

Originally posted by: npolite
Thanks everyone for your help. I've sent the drive back. I've always thought that once you get these you have a bad drive, I'm wondering why Seagate has a utility to repair them?

Also I got this drive the 2nd week in March not in Jan...this is not good...I wonder If these drives are similar to the 7200.11 series. If this happens again in 3 months, I'm going to ask that they send me a different series drive.

Sometimes they're reported as bad sectors, but are correctable. I don't know the science behind bad sectors. But I know in the past I have had drives report bad sectors. And running Spinrite on a few of the drive, they were corrected never to return. Also there's an old school DOS util called HD regenerator which can work magic on drives. Spinrite is my all time favorite HD util though.