New Seagate 4TB throwing errors

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ljk79

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Sep 25, 2024
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Hello all,

It just arrived today and I started a level 1 scan. ECC corrected is 72/94 and seek errors is 15/55. jpeg attached. Do I return it? It's replacing a WD 3TB that's only 4 years old and is also throwing seek errors. It's for a iMac Time Machine. My 2017 3TB Toshiba has never shown an error, wish they still made them.

Thanks,
Larry
 
ljk79 said:
ECC corrected is 72/94 and seek errors is 15/55
Click to expand...
Seagate overloads those values with extra meaning, which SpinRite 6.1 doesn't know how to parse. The drive is most likely fine.

ljk79 said:
jpeg attached.
Click to expand...
Attachments on this forum have be less than 500 KB.

ljk79 said:
It's replacing a WD 3TB that's only 4 years old and is also throwing seek errors.
Click to expand...
WD drives do this weird thing where Seek Errors drops by exactly 100, but doesn't seem to actually mean anything.
 
Larry,

I saw that you also wrote to Greg who answers GRC's support email. In that note you included your SpinRite S.M.A.R.T. data:

1727304196773.png

Those RED bars represent the DECREASE in the drive's own self-reported health due to the work SpinRite is doing. Or stated differently: That '94' on the right at the top is the MAXIMUM self-reported health that SpinRite has seen from the drive, likely at the start before it was run. And that '72' is the current self-reported health -- in this case as a RESULT of what SpinRite is asking the drive to do. And the same is true for the seek errors.

Now here's the problem: This probably should make you feel as uncomfortable as you do. But, as distressing as this is, it could also be "normal" for this make and model of drive. I doubt it. I hope not. But that's possible.

There's one way to know: Assuming that you have clear return rights from your seller, I would buy another drive immediately and give it the same test under SpinRite. If that drive behaves better (less or no RED) then keep it and return the weaker (and the confirmed marginally healthy) drive.

People used to use SpinRite for this 20+ years ago with physically detected sector defects... and this approach is still useful! 👍
 
Also ... @ColbyBouma always knows what he's talking about. So consider his reply, too. But I'd still buy another drive for comparison if you're able to return the weaker of the two... and PLEASE follow-up here and let us know what you discover if you decide to do that! thanks!
 
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Thanks All.

I'll order another one from Amazon as soon as the hurricane passes. We live east of Tampa.

The lack of consistency on the vendors use of SMART data is annoying at the least.

Larry
 
I agree with Steve and Colby.

FWIW: I have an older healthy Seagate drive that behaves the same way. It always shows ridiculous numbers for the attributes "ECC corrected" and "seek errors" every time I scan it. All else is good and SpinRite displays the green screen saver at the end of the run.

My Seagate drive is healthy; it works flawlessly. Your drive is very likely healthy too. I would expect your second drive to behave the same way, thanks to Seagate. If you detect a useful difference in the end of scan numbers for these two attributes for the two drives, then just keep the drive with the "better" numbers.

Keep this in mind however: These two attributes are meaningless for Seagate drives because of Seagate's proprietary use of them for something else entirely.
 
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ljk79 said:
Hello all,

It just arrived today and I started a level 1 scan. ECC corrected is 72/94 and seek errors is 15/55. jpeg attached. Do I return it? It's replacing a WD 3TB that's only 4 years old and is also throwing seek errors. It's for a iMac Time Machine. My 2017 3TB Toshiba has never shown an error, wish they still made them.

Thanks,
Larry
Click to expand...
Larry, if you can put that drive in a Windows or Linux machine, you could run Seagate’s utility to see what it says:

www.seagate.com

SeaTools | Seagate US

SeaTools - Quick diagnostic tool that checks the health of your drive.
www.seagate.com
 
Scott said:
Larry, if you can put that drive in a Windows or Linux machine, you could run Seagate’s utility to see what it says:

www.seagate.com

SeaTools | Seagate US

SeaTools - Quick diagnostic tool that checks the health of your drive.
www.seagate.com
Click to expand...
Also, SmarMonTools generally understands vendor specific SMART data, and is available (I think) for Mac, Linux, and Windows.

smartmontools

www.smartmontools.org www.smartmontools.org
 
Scott said:
Also, SmarMonTools generally understands vendor specific SMART data
Click to expand...
As far as I can tell, smartctl reports the same data as SpinRite. Only SeaTools knows how to decode what Seagate stores in those fields.

Here's some data from one of my Seagate drives. This repository contains many additional Seagate drives if you want to compare them.

gitlab.com

SATA/HDD/Seagate/Barracuda 7200.14/ST1000DM003-1CH162/S1DB3ZPB/SMART.txt · main · Colby Bouma / Storage Media Data · GitLab

A collection of data about storage devices (hard drives, SSDs, etc.). Primarily contains smartctl output right now.
gitlab.com gitlab.com

Code: 
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAGS    VALUE WORST THRESH FAIL RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     POSR--   115   099   006    -    98482488
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         POSR--   078   060   030    -    13100626719

SpinRite's "current" value is calculated by subtracting a SMART Attribute's THRESH field from the VALUE field. "max" is the highest value of "current" SpinRite has seen during the current scan. "margin" is a graphical representation of the difference between "current" and "max".

All of that is supposed to be an indication of a drive's health, but Seagate does non-standard things with those fields... for some stupid reason.

How do I interpret SMART diagnostic utilities results? | Seagate US

Discussion of the results third-party SMART monitoring programs can give on Serial ATA drives and how they relate to SeaTools diagnostics.
www.seagate.com
 
ColbyBouma said:
All of that is supposed to be an indication of a drive's health, but Seagate does non-standard things with those fields... for some stupid reason.
Click to expand...
Agreed. I can understand them doing anything they wish with the raw data since its meaning was never intended to be interpreted externally. But producing worrisomely low HEALTH values, which are intended to be used and interpreted externally, is just nuts.
 
Hello All,

Here’s where I’m currently at:
  1. I’m not replacing the 3TB WD Blue that’s in Time Machine service with the new Seagate Barracuda 4TB. Consensus seems to be it’s probably fine and WD is doing weird things with SMART data.​
  2. The 4TB Seagate is going in to my Gaming Linux Box (Mint xfce). Consensus seems to be it’s probably fine and Seagate is doing weird things with SMART data.​
  3. I'm not going to buy another drive at this time.​
I tried both the Seagate and WD software, and looking at the web pages they seem to be aimed at USB enclosures that each company sells. Neither recognized the drive installed into my own enclosure. I tried this on a 2019 iMac running Sequoia (15.0.0) and on an old Core i7 6700 running Windows 10 (fully patched). Thoughts?

Probably won’t try smartmontools at this time.

Thanks for all of the input.

Larry
 
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