Need second opinion, is my HD failing?

[Richard Shaw]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 11:42 AM, Matthew J. Roth <mroth at imminc.com> wrote:
> Richard Shaw wrote:
>>
>> Well it's a Seagate and is under warranty. I went ahead and paid the
>> $20 for the "Advanced Replacement" so I can get the replacement before
>> sending them the bad one. I downloaded both their bootable ISO and the
>> linux version of seatools. Interestingly the short test showed the
>> drive is good but the long test found an error.
>>
>> Richard
>
> Richard,
>
> My second opinion is that your drive isn't failing.  Before you send it back
> to Seagate, please take the time to read the following posts from Bryn
> Reeves:
>
>  * Understanding S.M.A.R.T. test results
> <https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2009-January/msg03397.html>
>  * Interpreting raw and normalized S.M.A.R.T. values
> <https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2009-January/msg03405.html>
>
> S.M.A.R.T. test results are a little confusing and often lead people to
> believe that a drive is failing even though it's perfectly fine.  Your test
> result was good, because none of your drive's pre-fail attributes were below
> the threshold value.  It's likely that if you ran Seagate's diagnostic tests
> on the drive they wouldn't find any problems.  If there are any
> non-destructive tests, try running them before you go through the hassle of
> replacing the drive.

The failure I got was from the unix/linux SeaTools "st" utility and
I've had a file I tried to copy off the drive through scp/nfs/samba
and all fail at about the 65% mark so I'm pretty certain the disk is
bad.

Richard