Bad/ reallocated sectors?

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Pierre
Posts: 156
Joined: Sun Jan 17, 2010 3:55 am
Location: Greece

Bad/ reallocated sectors?

Post by Pierre » Wed Mar 10, 2010 8:45 am

Something weird has happened...

All of a sudden, within a week - after having moved my system on the new Fractal Design case and then back to Cheftiec Bravo (I must stress I am very-very careful with the handling of hdds), three of my four Seagate 1.5TB drives have come up with reallocated sectors, at least according to HD Sentinel and CrystalDiskinfo Programs...the HDD Inspector program does not recognize any bad sectors...
All of these drives for which the programs report reallocated sectors bear the CC1H firmware (not affected by the previous seagate firmware issues)

I checked the relevant attribute's raw data of the reported smart values for differences between the healthy-not healthy drives, and the differences I've found are the following:
- 000000000000 for the healthy drives
- 000000000001 for two of the aforementioned drives (99% health rating and 1 reallocated sector read by hd sentinel)
- 00000000001B for the third drive (73% health rating and 27 reallocated sectors reported by HD Sentinel)

Something which I find weird however is that the numeric value is the same, 100 as standard, on all drives...(maybe that's why HDD Inspector does not see any problem with the drives, it only reads the numeric values)

I've also ran HDD Regenerator (in windows) but it did not locate any bad sectors...neither did Spinrite 6 (although the test was interrupted before completing)
The drives also successfully pass the long test of the Seagate Tools software, which is I guess understandable...

- What should I make of those reports? How worried should I be? Are the drives liable for return?

Thanks a lot...

whiic
Posts: 575
Joined: Wed Sep 06, 2006 11:48 pm
Location: Finland

Post by whiic » Wed Mar 10, 2010 6:02 pm

Whether you even have the possibility to return the HDDs (passing Seagate's diagnostics) may depend on Seagate's policy but regardless whether you could return them, I don't think it's worth the hazzle to return them. You'd receive refurbished HDDs as replacements.

The refurbished ones typically just have passed a recertification test, masking found bad sectors to zero so that the one who receives the HDD cannot see how many reallocated sectors are on the HDD. Some of the refurbs of course may be fixed from infamous bricking firmware issue, some may have had burnt components replaced. Either way, if you just have 1 and 27 reallocated sectors on two of your HDDs the HDDs that have been refurbished aren't probably any better for reliability.

You should keep monitoring your current HDDs if they get any worse. 27 bads isn't many so it's no wonder if the "value" remains at "100". As long as "value" is bigger than "threshold" for each attribute, your HDD has passing SMART values.

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