New Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drive faulty?

[Julian33]

I've just bought a new 250GB seagate barracuda drive to replace my 2 WD caviar drives I had in RAID 0 which failed. The drive seems great, and the performance seems to be much better than my old setup. However, when I look at the SMART data in speedfan, theres two attributes that are worrying me:



The hardware ECC recovered and seek error rate attributes seem to be very high, and also seem to increase every time I refresh the statistics. The seek error rate of my WD drives were 0, which is making me worry that there's some fault with this disk. Is it normal for drives to regularly have errors like these?[/img]

 

[paybax]

Hey Julian,
I don't know much about those types of errors. But I CAN tell you that with a clean brand new disk, there should not be ANY errors. The fact that the errors increase everytime you "refresh", is in my opinion troublesome. I don't like the "seek error" one's especially.

When did you buy the drive? And are you somewhat "COZY" with the staff at the place where you got the drive from? I only ask this becuase you can take this error data to them, and ask them to RMA the drive or replace it with another product. In most cases, if you just got the drive, you can exchange it with a small "re-stocking fee". Ohterwise, most comp stores (and they don't tell people this for obvious reasons) can do an "EXPRESS RMA" for certain circumstances. Don't wait too long before going back to the store, I say bring the drive back and .....maybe re-think going back to Western Dig hard drives.

Hope I gave you some pause for thought, most comp staff are easy to deal with if you have a good sales relationship like I have with the guys I deal with. Good luck with it.
Mike

RIG specs
Antec P180 PerformanceSeries Mid-Tower Case
SeaSonic S12 600 watt power supply
Asus A8N32 SLI mobo AMD N-Force 4 SLIX16 (bios 1103 V02.58)
RealTek 97 onboard digital 5.1 Surround
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Toledo Core, 2 X 1mb L2 cache (AMD drivers w/MS hotfix)
2 gigs of Corsair TwinX3500LL Pro @ 437Mhz 2-3-2-6-1T
2- BFG Tech 7900 GT OC 256mg in SLI (nvidia driver 91.31)
Western Digital RAPTOR 74.3 gig 10-K rpm HDD for XP & Apps
Maxtor SATA II 250 G HDD for gaming, movies, MP3's
Maxtor SATA II 250 G HDD for document backup (unplugged)
Sony CD rom 52X
Plextor 708-A DVD/CD rom
Logitech Z-5500 digital 5.1 THX Surround 500watts

 

[Julian33]

Thanks for the reply. I bought the drive last wednesday from www.overclockers.co.uk, who I've ordered from several times before and had no problems with. I think I might get in touch with them and/or Seagate to find out if this is normal behaviour for this drive.

Thanks again!

 

[paybax]

Hi Julian,
It sounds like you are overseas in the UK right? If so, this place you are dealing with, are they mail order? Or are they a walk in retail store?
If they are mail order, then I would suggest dealing DIRECTLY with Seagate. Make aure you have all neccessary info to supply them with because they will be asking for it. Remember, they don't just GIVE someone a new hdd just because they say it is not working.
Supply them with;
O/S
is it a fresh install?
chipset drivers
was the drive initialized proplerly with their software
etc etc
And also supply them with a few of those consecutive runs of those benchmarks that you supplied with your first post. Might I also suggest a detailed list of any measures you took to try to resolve the problem. It helps you in THEIR eyes to see that you did all you could to try to fix it. Also be sure to call SEAGATE tech support to explain your problem.

The reason for this is (not sure if everyone is aware of this but) they also record their incoming traffic for customer service purposes and to track recurring problems. And if it is ON RECORD that you called at least for example 5 times and did EVERYTHING they said, then it will help you when it comes to them deciding whether or not to grant you an RMA.
One last tip..... BE NICE and BE PATIENT with them always!!! REspect goes a long way to asking someone to do you a solid right?
Hope this helps bro
Sincerely,
Mike aka paybax

RIG specs
Antec P180 PerformanceSeries Mid-Tower Case
SeaSonic S12 600 watt power supply
Asus A8N32 SLI mobo AMD N-Force 4 SLIX16 (bios 1103 V02.58)
RealTek 97 onboard digital 5.1 Surround
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Toledo Core, 2 X 1mb L2 cache (AMD drivers w/MS hotfix)
2 gigs of Corsair TwinX3500LL Pro @ 437Mhz 2-3-2-6-1T
2- BFG Tech 7900 GT OC 256mg in SLI (nvidia driver 91.31)
Western Digital RAPTOR 74.3 gig 10-K rpm HDD for XP & Apps
Maxtor SATA II 250 G HDD for gaming, movies, MP3's
Maxtor SATA II 250 G HDD for document backup (unplugged)
Sony CD rom 52X
Plextor 708-A DVD/CD rom
Logitech Z-5500 digital 5.1 THX Surround 500watts

 

[unixoidal]

I bought (in Sweden) SATA 250Gb Barracuda 8Mb cache and after one month it died. From the begining it worked not good, bad sectors, strange sounds with following hangs etc. I lost it when I had already 3 operating systems installed, I was lucky to backup all data just several hours before it died in a way that BIOS cannot detect it anymore.

I will get the replacement, but I think I will resell it without even unpacking. Recently I am hearing many bad stories about faulty Seagates, another scary thing was when I visited seagate webside and noticed Maxtor logo there. After dealing with hardware more than 10 years, Maxtor sounds for me as low quality HDD manufacturer, their HDD live not very long, I don't know if Maxtor bought Seagate or vice versa but one thing is clear for me now: stick with Hitachi!