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From: Xavier Chantry <chantry.xavier@...>
Date: Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 3:24 PM
Subject: bad sectors with Seagate Momentus 5400.6 series
To: smartmontools-support@...
I have two external usb hard drive 500gb, which looked different from outside.
One is labelled Seagate Portable External Hard drive and was bought
last December.
The other is a Iomega Prestige Portable and was bought early january,
that one came with a double usb cable.
The first indication of failures were the Iomega one that started to
make some weird noise, and later Gnome SMART tool reported it as
deficient because of many bad sectors.
Some days and a full format later, the disk has more than 300
reallocated sectors but at least none pending :
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 084 084 036 Pre-fail
Always - 343
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age
Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 Old_age
Offline - 0
In parallel I started to check the other Seagate disk, and this one
turned to have many bad sectors as well :
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 096 096 036 Pre-fail
Always - 89
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age
Always - 86
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 Old_age
Offline - 86
It turns out these two external drives have exactly the same model inside :
Model Family: Seagate Momentus 5400.6 series
Device Model: ST9500325AS
Firmware Version: 0002BSM1
So now all my questions :
1) Can a lack of power cause bad sectors (instead of the disk simply
refusing to work) ?
>From http://www.harddiskhome.com/hard-disk-bad-sectors.html :
"It could even be bad power from the power supply. "
"The major reasons for the development of bad sector on hard drive is
due to improper shutdown and voltage fluctuations which may be the
general cause for the bad sectors."
Does the double usb cable shipped with the Iomega indicate that this
disk needs more power than the average ?
This laptop often has many usb devices plugged and has very few usb port.
So not only was just one usb connector plugged for each disk, but it
was also often plugged through a usb hub (if that's the correct term).
2) Is it still likely that this device model and/or firmware version
is bad , despite point 1) ?
3) Coud/Should I still try to get these two disks replaced , as they
are only 2-3 months old, but have 2-3 years warranty ?
Since the iomega drive was formatted and all its bad sectors
reallocated, the Seatools windows tool does not report anything bad.
It can only see that the short and long test pass. It does not seem to
care about the high number of Reallocated_Sector or provide any way to
even display it.
The Seagate Drive instantly fails with short test, but I suspect a
full format would also fix that. Is this what the technical support
should expect me to do ?
4) What is a high number of bad / reallocated sectors where one should
start worrying ?
And doesn't any hard disk vendor mention this point in their warranty ?
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