[smartmontools-support]new Seagate drives and erroneous data

[Dean J. <dt...@cr...>]

Howdy Bruce,
I didn't put two and two together, that you are Mr Smartmontools, when 
we exchanged email a bit ago about Cray and the RFP. Anyways, I just 
bought several new Seagate drives for personal use and smartctl is 
giving ugly numbers for Raw_Read_Error_Rate and Hardware_ECC_Recovered 
after only a couple of hours of powered up time. I see on the mailing 
list that other people have talked about this same problem. I decided to 
query Seagate support to try and get to the bottom of the issue. The 
responses weren't terribly interesting, but might mean more to you than me.

	Mr Johnson,

	 The drives have a off-line scan feature this is not taken into
	 consideration by the tools. The tools report this off-line scan as a
	 failed read and write.

	 Best regards,

	 Stefan M.
	 Seagate Technical Support

I followed up with a request for more specifics, but got.


	Hello,

	 Thank you for your inquiry.

	 A SMART failure means a certain error threshold has been exceeded.  A high
	 error rate does not mean a failing or bad drive.

	 Third-party SMART monitoring programs may not be able to read the SMART
	 data off of a Seagate drive correctly.

	 The only supported diagnostic is Seatools Desktop.  This will show PASS or
	 FAIL only for SMART.

	 http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/index.html

	 The only available information about the drive ST3160023A can be found in
	 its product manual.

	 http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/ata/cuda7200pm.pdf

	 Regards,

	 Robert A.
	 Seagate Technical Support

I did run Seatools on one of the drives and it came up clean. I kinda hate to commit 1.5TB of data to an LVM partition that I can't monitor. Blah. Thought you might like to know.

	-Dean