Seagate Hdd Diagnostics

[Jasmine Lemaitre]

Coworkerand I decided to set up a test bench and do diagnostics on it. Being a Seagate, we ran both SeaTools for WIndows and the bootable version. All tests passed save for the short self-test and the long fix-all. SMART was never tripped during the process. So we nuked it to DoD 5220.22 for the past 27 hours, figuring all the writes would have done it itn. It is still alive.

Michael - If it appears to be in good working condition, feel free to use it. I will warrant that if it failed in our appliance, it may have some sort of lingering issue, so I would not use it for anything mission critical.

Thanks, that's actually the drive I had my eye on before, what coincidence. I think I'll switch to the via controller again, the promise drive detection seems to add several sections to boot, which is plenty long enough, seeing as it takes a long time for even lilo to load!

I also tried the ubuntu 64 CD, same results on the hard drive, although it was a little faster (over 2MB/s on one trial), which I assume is to be expected without the 32 bit emulation layer. I've now tried several kernels with no cigar...

Is it at all likely that both controllers on the motherboard are hooped in such a way that they are working only a little... maybe like the communication between the controller and the memory or something? maybe they dropped a screwdriver on the board when they installed it or something like that?

I'm running ubuntu64 right now. When I run hdparm in it, I still get the abismal timings, but I can run it on the disk without getting the errors. I checked the output of hdparm -I, I don't see why my disk is so slow. Can anybody see anything wrong with this?:

I've also been running seagate diagnostics off of ultimate boot disk. Its not reporting any errors. I can't tell if its slow or not... can't find a program to actually measure the access time on there.

Somebody told me this setting could be adversly affecting my speed, but if I run hdparm -M 254 /dev/sda, I get the ioctl errors. Anyone know of another way I could set it? I can't find anything in the seagate utilities on ultimate boot CD.

3. Please make the "checking the HDD temperature by touching"-test I've performed when I rescued my data (painfully) from my ex-less-than-6-months-old-close-to-death-120GB-SATA-Maxtor. I found Maxtor sensibly hotter than my new Seagate (I believe I've checked this while idle). I just want to verify this with others. 10x

Both drives are currently active, as I am copying between the two (very very VERY slowly) at the moment. The Maxtor may be a little hotter than the Seagate, hard to tell for sure. It's a smaller drive (80GB vs 120GB seagate). Also, the Maxtor is working and the Seagate isn't. I just don't know whether to return the Seagate or assume the problem is in the kernel... none of the diagnostic tools on the ultimate boot disk found a problem, but I wasn't able to test timing sone way or another.

Dusty, I'm sorry to break it to you, but my 2 Seagate HDDs are both ST3120827AS (same as yours) and they both work fine (see my above tests). The total number of sectors is a bit different, but that doesn't seem to bother them while working (I don't use any RAID, yet).

What is your acoustic value if you run hdparm -I on the seagates? (hdparm -I only works for me when I'm in a 64 bit distro). Mine is 0 for the Seagate, and recommended something like 128 or so... and the Maxtor is a higher number like that. That's the only thing that could be a problem, but I don't know how to set it because the hdparm option to set acoustic value doesn't seem to work. :-(

I don't really have another system to test it on, nothing that supports sata. If I get to know the CS guys at work, maybe they can help me test it. Since this particular model works with Linux for you, the problem must either be in the hard drive, or the hard drive/sata controller combination. BUT I tried it with both the on-board via controller and the on-board promise controller, and it worked with neither. I think I better talk to NCIX and/or Seagate about returning it? I'd rather verify the problem first though... :-/

I was thinking today that you might want to try compiling a really old kernel and try it then... by really old I'm thinking of something like... 2.6.7 (or.. you already did this by using LiveCDs with old kernels?).

The Seagate people, while not very helpful, told me that its impossible for a SATA drive to slow down and it must be the controller. But I've tried both on-board controllers with this drive and it works with a Maxtor so... it must be the drive???

Ok, if anybody comes across this thread, I had a new Seagate drive shipped to replace the old one. It works fine. So I don't want anybody to think that Seagate or the Seagate/Asus combination is a problem; I just had a faulty drive.

My Seagate hard disk got bad sectors and wasn't usable any more. Seagate's SeaTools utility also indicates that. It was under warranty; so I returned that in Seagate SeaCare center and got a replacement drive within a few weeks. But even the replacement drive had the same problem of bad sectors and didn't even allow me to complete a Windows installation. So I visited the seagate service center one more time and got another replacement drive in a week's time. But to my surprise, that was faulty too and crashed during Windows installation. The SeaTools tests did confirm that both the replacement drives were indeed faulty.

I have read that these replacement drives are not brand new but only refurbished ones. (People at seacare center don't seem to have technical knowledge about it!) I wanted to know if that is really the case? And how can two replacement drives fail in a row?

More important question - do you think there might be anything wrong with my computer that's causing the disks to go bad so quickly? Whatever I know about computer hardware, this might not be the case. But I want to get opinions from experts out here before I decide to give up on my current disk and purchase a new one.

For your first question, yes, drives that you get back from such a "repair" both are not the exact drive you sent in, but also are not brand new. They are almost always "remanufactured" or "recertified". I once (years ago) called in on a drive I had just bought, and the vendor I purchased it from refused to do a replacement. So I called the manufacturer, and she urged me not to do a replacement through them, because it wouldn't be a new drive. She called my vendor and got them to do a replacement for me.

On your other question, could it be your computer? That's kind of what I was thinking... Have you tried these drives in another computer? Could it be that you have a cabling issue, a problem with that port on your controller/motherboard/backplane? Could it be that the drive isn't being cooled well enough (I've seen drives that were over their thermal limits report read/write issues).

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