Hard drive throwing SMART alarms. Can it be saved?

hamfactorial · Post by **hamfactorial** » Fri May 07, 2010 10:36 pm

I have a 1 TB Samsung EcoGreen F2 (HD103SI) which has served me well. While moving last week, I believe I unplugged the computer while it was still powered on.

After switching it on at the new apartment, my SMART monitoring software told me that it was certainly going to die. Not pleased, but happy that I adopted safe backup practices, I ordered a new, larger drive to replace it and renamed my backup drive to act in the failed drive's place.

Now I have everything running again, and I'm curious. Not one to give up on seemingly good hardware, I did a low-level format of the failed drive, identified a bad sector, and tested copies to and from the drive.

The two SMART values that are erroring are Raw Read Error Rate and Soft Read Error Rate, which are both at 1 (of 100, with threshold 51).

If it's toast, I have no problem throwing the drive away. I'm just curious, and since the readers here are knowledgeable, this is the first place I turned.

washu · Post by **washu** » Sat May 08, 2010 5:09 am

I've seen similar things happen on other drives and often they've been fine. A single bad sector is cause for concern, but does not automatically mean the whole drive is doomed. I have a Seagate momentus that had one bad sector repaired about two years ago and it's still running strong. I would not use any such drive for anything critical without a good backup in place.

On a side note, you did not "low level format" your drive, that's impossible through software. If a tool said it was doing it, at best it was writting zeros to every sector. True low level format of modern drives can only be done by the manufacturer with special equipment.

If you haven't already, I would use whatever drive tool Samsung provides and do a full scan. It should be able to repair/remap a small number of bad sectors so that the OS no longer sees them.

Wibla · Post by **Wibla** » Sat May 08, 2010 5:14 am

RMA it to be safe, if you dont need the drive right now you might aswell do it and have the good drive for later.

hamfactorial · Post by **hamfactorial** » Sat May 08, 2010 12:18 pm

Hi guys, thanks for the replies. I've had this drive more than a year, so I doubt any sort of warranty still applies. I'll run HDUTIL and see what kind of tricks I can play with it

Wibla · Post by **Wibla** » Sat May 08, 2010 1:58 pm

2 or 3 year factory warranty afaik, contact samsung to do an RMA

zodaex · Post by **zodaex** » Mon May 10, 2010 10:27 am

S.M.A.R.T. errors don't always mean much. I've had 2 hard drives fail on me without throwing out any errors. I also have 1 HDD that always throws out a smart error with every post but it has been operating fine for 5+ years.

dhanson865 · Post by **dhanson865** » Mon May 10, 2010 1:42 pm

Wibla wrote:2 or 3 year factory warranty afaik, contact samsung to do an RMA

3 year warranty if you go by newegg U$.

So long as you don't feel like you are responsible for damage to the drive RMA it. If you don't feel good about RMAing it or are too lazy to bother I thank you for indirectly keeping the cost of hardware down.

Michael Sandstrom · Post by **Michael Sandstrom** » Mon May 10, 2010 5:15 pm

Hi hamfactorial

I am not sure whether you know this but HUTIL is for older Samsung drives. The version that you need is called ES Tool.