HDD failure

[Franc Zabkar]

On Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:18:47 -0800 (PST), rowan194
<googlegroups@sensation.net.au> put finger to keyboard and composed:

On Feb 26, 4:39 pm, Franc Zabkar <fzab...@iinternode.on.net> wrote:
IIRC, I sent my dud Seagate drive to Synnex. The replacement has been
working fine and came with a full 5 year warranty.

Seehttp://www.synnex.com.au/Default.aspx?tabid=188

Are they an authorised Seagate distributor or more a large retailer
which supports resellers? I've never seen a Seagate warranty setup
like that - according to my local shop after 12 months I have to deal
with Seagate direct, and the drives they return are second hand/
reconditioned rather than a new replacement.

If Synnex are indeed an AU distributor for Seagate then I may actually
be able to get someone to respond to my complaint...

BTW, AFAIK a replacement Seagate drive only comes with the balance of
the original warranty, which is itself a few months under 5 years
since it's based on manufacture or ship date rather than purchase date.

That's what I thought, but when I checked the expiry date of the
warranty of my replacement drive on the Seagate web site, it was the
full 5 years. The original drive was about a year old, so if that's a
mistake, then I'm lucky. AFAIK the drive was replaced with a new one
from Synnex stock, so maybe that accounts for it. BTW I purchased the
original drive at a computer market and was directed to Synnex by the
Seagate web site.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

 

[Franc Zabkar]

On Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:09:57 -0800 (PST), rowan194
<googlegroups@sensation.net.au> put finger to keyboard and composed:

- one suddenly developed 99+ bad sectors (99 being the limit of
Seagate's error reporting). replaced with Seagate reco.

My 13GB Seagate drive reported 119 reallocated sectors just before I
took it out of service (because it was growing new defects on a weekly
basis):
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SmartUDM/13GB.RPT

Its S.M.A.R.T. status was still OK.

I think the figure of 99 you are referring to may be the "normalised"
value, not the raw value. I believe my 13GB drive would have been
allowed to develop several thousand bad sectors before its S.M.A.R.T.
status would have been reported as bad.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

 

[rowan194]

On Feb 27, 6:57 am, Franc Zabkar <fzab...@iinternode.on.net> wrote:

I think the figure of 99 you are referring to may be the "normalised"
value, not the raw value. I believe my 13GB drive would have been
allowed to develop several thousand bad sectors before its S.M.A.R.T.
status would have been reported as bad.

99 was the value reported by Seatools during an extended test - and it
increased from 0 during the test - so I presume it's a count of
sectors with unrecoverable errors during that scan, rather than
sectors which have been quietly reallocated by the firmware. The
likely reason S.M.A.R.T. didn't kick in is because it happened very
suddenly. Things were fine then suddenly I could see my HD light
getting "stuck" as if it was having problems reading from a drive.
Unfortunately my RAID software does not provide any diagnostic tools
to show which particular drive is playing up, so the only choice I
have is to drop into DOS and run Seatools on all drives. Takes a while
when you have over 2 billion total sectors to scan.......

 

[rowan194]

Here's the diagnostics on the dud reconditioned drive that Seagate
sent me

http://satin.sensation.net.au/rowan/dudseagate.jpg

Short test FAILS, long test finds 80 errors but is able to remap them
and therefore SUCCEEDS, a subsequent short test FAILS

Shortly after this I rebooted and the drive reported a S.M.A.R.T.
event.

Note "POH 1" which means it's only been powered on for a total of 1
hour! (Not entirely true, since it's a reconditioned drive the
mechanicals could have been run for who knows how long. The firmware
was just reset to 0)

This was a replacement for a faulty drive and it turned out to be even
worse... may as well have just kept the first one...

 

[Franc Zabkar]

On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 03:36:51 -0800 (PST), rowan194
<googlegroups@sensation.net.au> put finger to keyboard and composed:

Unfortunately my RAID software does not provide any diagnostic tools
to show which particular drive is playing up, so the only choice I
have is to drop into DOS and run Seatools on all drives. Takes a while
when you have over 2 billion total sectors to scan.......

You might like to try smartctl:
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

Here is the log for my 13GB Seagate drive:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/Smartctl/13gb.log

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

 

[rowan194]

On Feb 28, 8:02 am, Franc Zabkar <fzab...@iinternode.on.net> wrote:

On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 03:36:51 -0800 (PST), rowan194
googlegro...@sensation.net.au> put finger to keyboard and composed:

Unfortunately my RAID software does not provide any diagnostic tools
to show which particular drive is playing up, so the only choice I
have is to drop into DOS and run Seatools on all drives. Takes a while
when you have over 2 billion total sectors to scan.......

You might like to try smartctl:
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

Yeah, I'm aware of smartctl, but unfortunately the Windows RAID driver
presents the array as a single SCSI drive. Have tried many diagnostic
utils with the same result. It's likely that even in another OS (such
as *nix) there may still be issues with detecting and reporting data
for individual drives. The only other thing I can think of is to buy a
standalone PCI SATA card and selectively swap drives between the
onboard RAID and the standalone SATA controller, but doing so will
invalidate/degrade the array, requiring rebuilding between each drive
swap. May as well just do the Seatools tests...

On my FreeBSD servers I'm moving over to software RAID1, which has the
advantage that every HD util can still see the individual drives. I've
run smartctl there. (Easy to see if a webhost is using second hand
drives!)

 

[Franc Zabkar]

On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:22:15 -0800 (PST), rowan194
<googlegroups@sensation.net.au> put finger to keyboard and composed:

On Feb 28, 8:02 am, Franc Zabkar <fzab...@iinternode.on.net> wrote:
On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 03:36:51 -0800 (PST), rowan194
googlegro...@sensation.net.au> put finger to keyboard and composed:

Unfortunately my RAID software does not provide any diagnostic tools
to show which particular drive is playing up, so the only choice I
have is to drop into DOS and run Seatools on all drives. Takes a while
when you have over 2 billion total sectors to scan.......

You might like to try smartctl:
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

Yeah, I'm aware of smartctl, but unfortunately the Windows RAID driver
presents the array as a single SCSI drive. Have tried many diagnostic
utils with the same result. It's likely that even in another OS (such
as *nix) there may still be issues with detecting and reporting data
for individual drives. The only other thing I can think of is to buy a
standalone PCI SATA card and selectively swap drives between the
onboard RAID and the standalone SATA controller, but doing so will
invalidate/degrade the array, requiring rebuilding between each drive
swap. May as well just do the Seatools tests...

On my FreeBSD servers I'm moving over to software RAID1, which has the
advantage that every HD util can still see the individual drives. I've
run smartctl there. (Easy to see if a webhost is using second hand
drives!)

If you drop back to DOS, then you could try SMARTUDM. It reports raw
SMART attributes. You may not need to run a complete Seatools
diagnostic. In any case, if the bad sectors have already been
reallocated, then there'll be nothing for Seatools to report.

See http://www.sysinfolab.com/download.htm

SMARTUDM is claimed to support "external UDMA/SATA/RAID controllers
(HPT/Promise/FastTrack)".

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.