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SMART Attribs in Modern HDDs

Y

yuckhil

Junior Member
I recently bought a 160GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 IDE drive (ST3160023A). It worked well, and I experienced no apparent problems. However, I installed SpeedFan from www.almico.com/speedfan.php, and found that the drive's SMART attributes, specifically 'Hardware ECC Recovered' and 'Raw Read Error Rate' incremented all the time.
So I checked about 5 other HDDs, all about 5 years old and < 10GB, and found that none of them had values less than 100% for these parameters. I suppose my paranoia grew to the point that I gently shook the 7200.7 and thought I heard something loose inside. I'm a bit ashamed to say I claimed warranty on the drive.
The store gave me a new 7200.9 drive (ST3160812A), which works well, but I find that the SMART attributes are always on the rise for this drive too.
Questions:
1. Does this indicate an impending drive failure or not?
2. Anybody know of any Web resources that document this tendency in modern drives, as opposed to older drives?

Thanks.
 
I think that's normal for Seagate drives. All of my Seagates have high values for Raw Read Error Rate, Seek Error Rate, and Hardware ECC Recovered. Things to be concerned with are Current Pending Sector Count, Reallocated Sector Count, and possible Write Error Rate. They may indicate new bad sectors in the making.

All hard drives encounter errors on a regular basis, but they're automatically and invisibly corrected. Notice that the Raw Read Error Rate and Hardware ECC Recovered are equal. (At least, on my system they are.)
Every error caught is corrected right away. This is normal. It's just that a lot of drives don't publish this information.

Sample screenshot
That's from one of my Seagates, working perfectly fine.
 
i ran the program right now for the in depth test on the hard drive and for Hardware ECC Recovered my current is 100 and raw is 287749 but overall is Very good, my hard drive is a maxtor 60GB from 2002. as for the other Raw Read Error Rate current is 100, raw is 0, overall is Very good. if you want we can continue to compare the hard drives, but since you already replaced it with another, i would say that hard drive is also fine. are those older drives also from seagate? according to speedfan seagate did report differently in the past verions of speedfan..
 
Hmm... That's a new version of the software - it didn't have the 'In-depth Analysis' when I used it first. In this version, the values are the same as before, but the overall bar at the bottom of the drive is much better. I don't have an Internet connection at home, so I can't perform the 'In-depth Analysis'.
Note: Over the duration of 2 days, the drive's overall 'Fitness' has dropped from 95% to 93%. Very unnerving.
The older drives are assorted: Seagate Medallist 1.6GB, IBM Deskstar 40GB, Quantum Fireball 8GB and another I can't find. Maybe Seagate has changed teh way they use SMART.
Thank you for your analysis.
 
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