Which HDD test programme to trust (SMART interpretation)?

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Hi,

I had a curious situation with my Seagate disk. It was not recognized by my HTPC after a small windows update and following restart. I took it out and put it in my desktop rig.
I had a quick look at it with already installed HD Tune and it reported "Seek error rate" as failed and marked it with red colour. It also marked "Spin retry count" with yellow, although the data contains 0.

So I downloaded SeaTools to check the disk and found that everything is in perfect order, as I expected. Then I tried with HD Sentinel and it also says everything is all right.

On one hand, I'm aware the Seek Error Rate and Spin Retry Count would indicate a mechanical problem with the head. But it could also be a power supply glitch. I would presume the latter, since the disk booted normally since and performs without a problem (although the disk's power on time is almost 700 days).

But on the other hand, different monitoring programmes interpret SMART data differently. So, which one should I trust?

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Trust SeaTools or any of the drive manufacturer's own diagnostic software.

HD Tune imposes it's own interpretation of SMART data and decides when to flag up a potential problem based on it's own preset criteria.

SeaTools and other drive maker's diagnostics comprehensively tests various functions of the drive itself (in extended testing mode), regardless of the SMART data, whereas HD Tune does not .