S.M.A.R.T. Errors on HD's - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: lgbeno
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2013, 06:59:41 pm
content: Ok I apologize in advance for starting this thread not exactly electronics related but it's frustrating!I have a 3yr old Seagate ST31000528AS 1TB hard drive.It works pretty decent except keeps throwing a SMART error for "Reallocated Sector Count"I've backed up all of my data very well as a precaution. Please don't lecture...As a cheap & skeptical engineer, I'm inclined to milk it for its last hour of operation before replacing it. I guess I also know that it could be a false error or overly conservative feature to promote HD sales.What do you think?

author: madires
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2013, 07:21:41 pm
content: Sounds like the disk is remapping sectors to the spare space. I'd buy a new disk because the effort to restore a backup (and dealing with a few lost files) in case of a disk fail is more expensive than getting a new disk.

author: Sionyn
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2013, 07:29:06 pm
content: i can highly recommended this for all your hard drive debugging needs,https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

author: dfmischler
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2013, 07:39:53 pm
content: Quote from: lgbeno on August 26, 2013, 06:59:41 pmWhat is the reallocated sector count? A decent disk diagnostic program can tell you.My experience is that sometimes hard disks fail in ways that SMART does not detect in a timely manner, but that if SMART is complaining about a disk then the disk is probably soon to be toast.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2013, 07:40:50 pm
content: this means the drive has developed bad sectors and has gone over the number of allowed bad sectors.drives have 'spare sectors' to do remapping. ALL drives have bad sectors these days. there is a pool of spare sectors used that are set during manufacturing. when the pool is used up the remap can no longer happen.the smart error tells you : this drive is out of spare sectors... if we get other bad sectors i will start decreasing the usable size.as lng as there are spare sectors and remapping can be done the drive controller simlpy marks a defective sector as bad and points to one of the spare sectors. in this case the drive capacity does not decrease ....once you run out of spares the sector is still marked as bad but overall drive capacity decreases ...anyway , running into this means the drive is slowly dying ... it may have developed a microscratch which , by every flyover of the head , creates more damage ....

author: grumpydoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2013, 10:04:01 pm
content: QuoteIt might not have run out of reallocation space yet - depends on the actual values reported.For all the disks I've examined the value of the "Reallocated Sector Count" seems to reflect how many "spare" sectors are left, converted to an arbitrary scale with say 100 (sometimes 200, sometimes something else) as "all spare sectors available". There's also a threshold value which is the point the disk drive manufacturer thinks there is a problem.So, looking at one of my drives (a WD Caviar Green) I haveValue=200, Thresh=140, Raw Value=0So, this one is going to start at 200 and when 30% of the reallocation space is used, shout Possum.Another (a Samsung) isValue=252, Thresh=10, Raw Value=0This one has to fall to less than 5% of available space before Samsung consider it "failed".Yet another (a Hitachi)Value=100, Thresh=5, Raw Value=0The raw value is generally the number of sectors which have been reallocated.So, if the raw value is non-zero but the "value" is above the "threshold" you have a few reallocated sectors which might be a problem but which is currently "within tolerance".If the value isbelowthe threshold but greater than zero then you have a problem but you still have some leeway.If the value is zero then you're out of leeway.QuoteYep - agree with this 100%.You should consider this drive with extreme suspicion. It might not be going to die anytime soon but you should back up the contentsnow, or sooner and then run a filesystem error check.Having backed up the drive you have a few options.If the drive is fully out of spare sectors I'd get a new one. If not you might watch the drive for a while- It could be that the "Reallocated Sector Count" sticks at the current value and doesn't change. Apart from regular backups it's probably OK to continue to use the drive.- it could, however, be that the count continues to fall towards zero. In which case the drive is obviously failing and you should get a new one.I've had drives do both.

author: lgbeno
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 26, 2013, 11:04:10 pm
content: So mine is saying value = 4, threshold = 36Probably have to bite the bullet...

author: rexxar
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 02:27:09 am
content: I will probably get lynched for this, but Seagate drives have a serial port on them that you can use to do all sorts of fun things, including resetting SMART statistics.In my experience, SMART is a heap of shit. Incredibly prone to false errors, killing your drive long before it really needs to. I had a 400GB Seagate IDE drive give me bad sector errors. I didn't really believe that at the time (I don't remember my reasoning), but I reset the SMART statistics, did a low-level format, and I didn't get another bad sector warning forthree years.If you want to use your drive to store non-critical data that is backed up elsewhere, you can use the serial port and clear out the SMART stats. You can probably get a few more years out of it before it complains again.

author: casper.bang
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 04:50:12 am
content: QuoteFalse errors are better than false Ok's though, and when dealing with peoples precious data it seems prudent to err on the side of conservatism!Where SMART flags really come to its right, is when dealing with SSD's due to the predictable failures of NAND and extensive bookkeeping. I haven't had a spinning platter drive for 5+ years, and at work I'm running a 5TB test server using consumer grade SSD's (Samsung 830) and it's just darn handy to be able to assert that a drive had it's cell overwritten 1000 times (33% wear level for 21nm MLC) so you know when to proactively replace a disc.I've lost data and discs back in the spinning days, but since monitoring SMART flags proactively on my SSD's, I have yet to see one fail.

author: grumpydoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 07:26:19 am
content: QuoteIt's just a reporting mechanism so it can't "kill your drive long before it really needs to" - it's up to you whether you pay any attention.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 08:16:54 am
content: Quote from: rexxar on August 27, 2013, 02:27:09 amThat's because it remapped the sectors and carried on as it was designed to.

author: madires
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 10:03:52 am
content: Quote from: rexxar on August 27, 2013, 02:27:09 amMay I assume that you don't know Google's report on SMART? In about 50% of all failed disks SMART didn't indicate any problems pointing to an imminent disk fail. That's the main issue with SMART! Regarding bad sectors, even brand new disks already got some. If they don't increase over time there's nothing to worry. But if the counter suddenly starts to increase it's time to get a new disk.

author: Recyclojunk64
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 10:57:04 am
content: QuoteSpeaking of false errors, here is the SMART statistics of the 1TB drive in my computer. That can't surely be right can it?I did buy it second hand by the way but it had been hardly used though.

author: casper.bang
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 01:38:25 pm
content: Pretty sure "value" is the raw uninterpreted register. If there is a problem with SMART, it's that flags are not standardized good enough - some manual judgment is often needed.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 01:50:13 pm
content: Your seek error rate is through the roof. .... No wonder you get read errors. This looks like a scratch on the media.

author: fluxcapacitor
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 02:25:46 pm
content: Quote from: rexxar on August 27, 2013, 02:27:09 amYou can clear smart with N1 command .https://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/

author: edavid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 03:03:59 pm
content: Quote from: Sionyn on August 26, 2013, 07:29:06 pmI haven't found it very useful. First of all, it hasn't been updated for years, so it doesn't work right on many modern drives. Second, if the drive has any bad sectors at all, it gets bogged down in its stupid data recovery voodoo, which can't be turned off, and never works.

author: Sionyn
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 03:50:18 pm
content: i wouldn't say voodoo just some very complex and clever algorithms implemented very well in a tiny program that just works, i dissembled it think iy quite elegant.Spinrite interacts with the drives built in ecc. This is what makes it partition/file system agnostic.When it finds bad blocks, it moves the data and marks the bad blocks using the same mechanisms that the drive firmware uses when it detects bad data.The OS asks for sector 20, for example - and if sector 20 is bad and the data that was in it has been moved to sector 23,495 the drive handles the request at a hardware level and hands the contents of sector 23,495 to the OS as fulfilment of the request for sector 20. This happens in the controller on the hard drive itself - if you had an analyzer on the IDE or SATA cable between the drive and the computer, you would see the drive respond with the equivalent of "here's the contents of sector 20" even though the drive is physically storing that data on sector 23,495. It's done at an extremely low level inside the hard drive itself.smart is next to useless its reliable enough and instead trades off integrity for speeddrives have error correcting built in - but Spinrite is much more thorough then any drives built in error correcting diagnostics. hard drive makers are stupid (sometimes I wonder) it's just that people wouldn't tolerate the speed delays that the intensive algorithm's that Spinrite uses in the day to day usage of their drives. People want their hard drives to be speedy.oh and their are betas of a upcoming update for spinrite including uefi support

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 04:34:16 pm
content: Download and run seatools or what ever Seagate is calling their software.

author: madires
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 05:11:05 pm
content: Quote from: Sionyn on August 27, 2013, 03:50:18 pmActually it does perform some statistical analysis (read same sector again for x times) to figure out if a bit is more likely a 0 or a 1. And that can take very long. If you need to get the data Spinrite might help. But if you need to get the system up and running again ASAP it's the wrong tool.

author: fluxcapacitor
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 10:00:59 pm
content: Spinrite, Victoria , MHDD are all good software tools worth trying if you have nothing to lose or can`t afford to send the drive to a recovery specialist.

author: Unknown
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 11:07:53 pm
content: It's clear to me what MHDD (and I think Victoria works the same) does: read sectors, write sectors, and measure the latency. It's clear how this might trigger rewriting the checksum or reallocation, and I might also believe that marginal sectors will have a longer delay.Spinrite might have done something useful back when MFM/RLL drives were common and software was able to directly control hard drive heads. These days it just seem like a bunch of voodoo to me, especially the nonsense about bypassing mechanisms that you can't disable according to the ATA standard. I'm sure there are undocumented, model-specific commands for some of this, but how can a program not updated for almost ten years keep up with this? You would probably need to rewrite the HDD firmware (good luck with that) to do what Spinrite claims, never mind that drives have been using much more sophisticated encoding schemes (eg.NPML) than what the Spinrite documentation portrays since forever.I haven't seen any positive comments about Spinrite from someone in the HDD or data recovery business. Is this all a plot against Spinrite, or is it just nonsense? Spinrite fixing a drive is like the rock that keeps tigers away: just because you don't see tigers doesn't mean the rock had anything to do with it.

author: lgbeno
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 11:34:09 pm
content: Great tips, so I didn't mention this first go around but the hd is buried inside of my iMac. I replaced it one, if I'm going to get in there again I should probably get a new drive...

author: edavid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 11:52:41 pm
content: Quote from: Stonent on August 27, 2013, 04:34:16 pmWhy? What does it do that's useful?

author: edavid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 27, 2013, 11:53:37 pm
content: Quote from: madires on August 27, 2013, 05:11:05 pmThat's what it claims to do, and it does take very long, but I have never seen it actually recover data.

author: grumpydoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2013, 08:45:54 am
content: QuoteIt ticks the box so that you can send it back under warrantyWhich reminds me I ave two weeks to run it on the failed Seagate that I have and get an RMA sorted.....

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2013, 07:10:05 pm
content: Best fun I had with a Seagate was one that took longer and longer to read when warm. Did the RMA on it and bought a new drive and ghosted it over with the case open and a fan blowing cold air on it. Then took it to Storgate ( seagate reps here) and filled in the RMA. They tested the drive there in the air-conditioned office ( I swore a few penguins were in there as well complaining about the weather) and of course it passed and they wanted to cancel the RMA. I then placed the drive back in the box still connected and told them to run the test again and sure enough it was failing when hot, so I got another 4G drive from them. Even had to set the jumper on the drive to limit it to 2g ( motherboard did not support a LBA above 2G, such a big drive then.......) and still have it around in a box.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2013, 08:05:19 pm
content: Quote from: grumpydoc on August 28, 2013, 08:45:54 amYou don't need to run their stupid tool to return a drive. Believe me, I've returned plenty of faulty Seagate drives.

author: mrflibble
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2013, 08:27:32 pm
content: Quote from: Recyclojunk64 on August 27, 2013, 10:57:04 am2.9 years of power on is hardly used? Or maybe you bought it 2.89999 years ago and have had it on all the time?At any rate, SMART monitoring in my experiencing has been fairly useful as anindicatorso far. It's not superduper 100% reliable, but it's definitely better than nothing. Especially if you have a whole bunch of same disks at various locations, and keep track of those over time.

author: edavid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2013, 10:46:14 pm
content: Quote from: madires on August 27, 2013, 10:03:52 amDoes anyone know of any updates or followon work to the Google report?

author: Unknown
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 28, 2013, 10:51:44 pm
content: I remember not being impressed by the report at the time because they failed to account for confounding variables (eg. rotational speed) when they studied the relationship between temperature and failure rate. It's the only public work of its kind studying such a large population of drives, but the quality of the data analysis was mediocre at best in my opinion.

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2013, 11:39:46 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on August 28, 2013, 08:05:19 pmI had a string of about 15 Seagate drives all the same model that failed within a couple of months. All did the same things, just failed to detect by the BIOS. Turns out there's a way to fix that now where you can connect a Max232 to some pins and enter a serial console where you can give it a command to start working again.Wish I had known about it years ago.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 28, 2013, 11:43:19 pm
content: Quote from: Stonent on August 28, 2013, 11:39:46 pmThe 7200.11 clusterfuck. They had to offer free data recovery for two different failures (including the one you're thinking of) on that series, for hundreds of thousands of drives.There's a reason I won't be buying Seagate again.

author: dfmischler
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 29, 2013, 09:31:06 am
content: Quote from: alm on August 28, 2013, 10:51:44 pmWhich would be fine if they would release the raw data, but they probably never will.

author: rr100
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 29, 2013, 12:14:11 pm
content: Here's my story, from last week, hang on...I always said you can't pick sides when there are so few competitors, and now there are only two basically (Seagate and WD since Hitachi and Samsung and a bunch more smaller ones got swallowed and ignoring Toshiba which would be the third one). Even if I wish Seagate to die either quickly today or in long pain during the next year still no good can come from this, we'll just have even worse choice and worse prices and worse quality in the end.BUT last week was the icing on the cake. It all started small, one bad on one hard drive from some unimportant computer. Being Samsung now the support is from Seagate and I had to run that Seatools. Windows version, nice. HOWEVER when it starts it scans all the drives in the system and if it finds something "surprising" (as in some name or serial or whatever from a WD drive) guess what, it crashes! Suggestion is to disconnect the non-seagate drives ... but that's the system disk. What now, get another seagate disk and install windows on it just to test the broken seagate disk, even if I have already a running system?Ok, got the ISO version, boot, of course it saves the logs on floppy (yes, I know, you can make a bootable USB DOS stick, whatever, the point is about the designed and expected behaviour)!But this was NOTHING! Here comes the nasty part, totally unrelated. Yes, more or less the 7200.11 or similar clusterfuck. Moved some drives from one unused box to a new one and checked the firmware, just in case. Darn, there was one Seagate where problems were mentioned in freakin' wikipedia. Ok, let's upgrade the firmare. Windows program, hurray! Windows will restart your PC, ok, nothing so bad (there are some low-level thingies that run before full windows loads, most notably for example a normal chkdsk on the boot drive in windows so I could expect a drive flasher to run there, why not).BUT THE FREAKIN FIRMWARE UPDATER ACTUALLY NUKED MY TRACK 0 ON MY MAIN DRIVE. Now it stayed there smug saying SEAGATE and not booting. ARGHHHHHHHH!I know what happened, probably it tried to make my drive somehow boot into DOS and then do the upgrade and then restore the drive as it was before but it didn't work.To make the very long story short it took me about 20h (on Saturday no less) to guess the partition table right (some time ago I had to shift the partitions to accomodate the advanced format and any casual look was showing the old partitions, a bit shifted and useless, giving false alarms/hopes). YES, I do have backups, including offline backups but I didn't fancy restoring EVERYTHING when I had a freakin' good copy on a perfectly good drive.After guessing the right partition table I did get to do the flash upgrade from the DOS version of the updater in the end but also I had to force it with a cryptic command line (even if the update was specifically for my drive).Now all is good but Seagate really is out for me. Don't know much about the drives but really the supporting software is straight nasty.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 29, 2013, 12:30:23 pm
content: Seriously, why do people even bother with Seatools?

author: Unknown
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 29, 2013, 01:38:14 pm
content: I wouldn't trust these kinds of tools under Windows anyway. Too much complexity and things that might interfere with low level hardware commands. I always use the DOS versions, and since I don't care about saving logs, either a CD or USB stick works fine.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 29, 2013, 01:39:44 pm
content: Quote from: alm on August 29, 2013, 01:38:14 pmIt's nothing but a SMART utility anyway.

author: madires
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 29, 2013, 02:11:43 pm
content: Quote from: Monkeh on August 29, 2013, 12:30:23 pmBecause they're asked to run it before RMAing ;-)

author: Unknown
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: August 29, 2013, 02:12:35 pm
content: It might implement some extra tests beyond the SMART self test. I know the IBM/Hitachi one would run (or claim to run) some extra tests on IBM/Hitachi branded drives, and just run the standard SMART test on other drives. Plus it's a convenient manufacturer-supported utility that you can easily run from USB stick.

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 29, 2013, 02:13:41 pm
content: Quote from: alm on August 29, 2013, 02:12:35 pmThey wouldn't want anyone to reverse engineer any extra tests they do.Just a crap SMART tool. Waste of effort and not required to return yet another faulty Seagate turd.

author: rr100
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: August 30, 2013, 01:14:53 pm
content: - I don't think there's much Seagate vodoo in seatools, it's probably more or less a (very restricted) combination of the normal/standard (open source, well documented) programs that can read SMART and issue some tests and some stuff to read and write on the disk (like linux badblocks utility)- also modern drives are not programmed via bit banging on the parallel port or something but via normal ATA commands (albeit sometimes with non-standard parameters) so there's no problem to use a "real" operating system to do anything to them. In fact there is a windows version of seatools ... the problem is that if it sees something unexpected (like a non-seagate drive!!!) it crashes.

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 02, 2013, 02:06:47 pm
content: I've seen zero reallocated sector count (raw SMART value) on all the new drives I've bought, and if I found one with non-zero right from the start it's getting returned. If a drive in use starts developing bad sectors it gets replaced.

author: fluxcapacitor
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 03, 2013, 12:37:28 am
content: Quote from: amyk on September 02, 2013, 02:06:47 pmThe zero reallocated sector count is set at the factory before shipping.All (90%+) of consumer drives have defects .The defects are sortd into the Plist and Glist,the Glist fills over the lifetime of the drive ,usually when s.m.a.r.t. report a drive is going awol its because the Glist is almost full and all spares are used up.