Seek error rate & Seagate/Maxtor drives

[Elixer]

I was checking SMART from some of my seagate drives 7200.8, 7200.9, 7200.10 and they all have the same issue. Everytime I refresh the SMART data, the one parameter that always increases is seek error rate.

It seems to be a common problem, if you search via the search engine, but nobody has the answer as to why this happens.
You ask Seagate, and they just say RMA it. :roll:

The drives are still fine, from what I can tell, just that annoying hiccup.

-- S.M.A.R.T. --------------------------------------------------------------
ID Cur Wor Thr Raw Values Attribute Name
07 _79 _60 _30 0000051522B8 Seek Error Rate

and it increases by 5 anytime I refresh it.

I am just curious if anyone that has recently gotten a seagate can check their HD out, and see if it still happens?

CrystalDiskInfo (http://crystalmark.info/softwa...DiskInfo/index-e.html) is pretty nice for windows users to check SMART status.

For what it is worth, I also checked the SMART info in linux, and it mimics the findings of crystaldiskinfo.

 

[Russwinters]

If you are getting seek errors it means that your drive is starting to not be mechanically sound anymore. There is something going on with the heads. It could be some other things, but less likely.


Long story short is that while the drives may seem fine, and may very well run fine for another year while getting some seek errors, is that the drive is no longer 100%....it is liable to fail at any time.

 

[Elixer]

I don't think this is the case, I have now gone through my entire inventory of seagate HDs, and they *all* are doing that.
HDs range from under 1 year to 3 years old. A total of 8 of them.
Something else must be going on...

 

[PandaBear]

The "Seek Error" you saw is not a software failure or mechanical failure, but rather the overshot/undershot of the head trajectory in the particular position/time of the actuator movement. You can think of it as I'm suppose to be at track 20000 but I'm actually at 19997, so I need to apply more current to move faster, or vice versa.

The only way you don't have any seek error or trajectory error is if you do not have any movement. As long as the final destination is arrived and you have enough time for the final movement to settle, it is ok to move faster and tolerate a larger seek error.

 

[Elixer]

Originally posted by: PandaBear
The "Seek Error" you saw is not a software failure or mechanical failure, but rather the overshot/undershot of the head trajectory in the particular position/time of the actuator movement. You can think of it as I'm suppose to be at track 20000 but I'm actually at 19997, so I need to apply more current to move faster, or vice versa.

The only way you don't have any seek error or trajectory error is if you do not have any movement. As long as the final destination is arrived and you have enough time for the final movement to settle, it is ok to move faster and tolerate a larger seek error.

There is no access to the HDs, except for getting the SMART info, and that is stored on a EEPROM I thought?

Which is why I said it is weird, that the drive isn't doing and reading / writing, yes, it is spinning, but no access to it besides polling it for the SMART info. And each and everytime it polls the drive, the counter goes up by 5.

 

[PandaBear]

HD store only the bare minimum of stuff on EEPROM, just enough to get it to load the main firmware from the hard drive in a lower density manufacturer reserve area. Configuration data and run time log like SMART are stored in the manufacturer reserve area.

Having these counters go up is honest and fine. You probably don't want a drive that hide everything until it suddenly fail, that, IMO, is not honest.

These errors are fine as a huge portion of HD has bad sectors or bits. When I was working for Maxtor we typically see bad sectors in the scale of 400-1000, and that's the uncorrectable ECC ones, the correctable ECC basically take care of any sectors with less than 40 bits of error. Without ECC every drive will have to scrap 20% of its space easily.

Don't worry, just keep an eye on the reassigned/reallocated sectors and you'll be fine.