Samsung SMART reallocated sector count rising

spirits247 · 24 Oct 2010 at 17:33

Seagate SMART reallocated sector count rising

TITLE IS WRONG - THIS IS ABOUT SEAGATE REALLOCATED SECTORS - SILLY ME!!!

I used to always use Seagate, Samsung and WD for hard drives. Mainly Seagate and never had a bad experience. The 7200.10 160GB drives were rock solid and still going strong with zero reallocated sectors after a thorough thrashing. In fact, I've never had reallocated sectors on desktop drives ever, but don't run RAID or servers.

The last couple of Seagate 500GB 7200.12 drives I bought however with 500GB platters are experiencing a very slow increase in reallocated sectors. One is worse than the other, rising to 63 after a few months light use. They both pass diagnostic tools fine. They have the CC34 firmware, with 130MB/s reads and 15ms access.

The yellow access times in HDtune are also the worst I've seen for a desktop drive - spread out more than they should showing multiple reads where the drives has taken double the time to access data. I've changed SATA cables, although I was told bad cables don't cause reallocated sectors.

Now Seagate have released about four or five newer firmwares since then for these drives, which to me seems an awful lot! They must be having issues with these drives reading 500GB platters. Perhaps the newer ones are all fixed, but I'd be interested to see what access times they are giving.

The later firmwares, latest being CC46 or something, are reported to increase access times to 20ms which is unacceptable for a modern desktop drive.

Anyone else found the Seagates 7200.12's to be reallocated sectors in smart? Did any of you update your firmware and noticed an increased access time? Did newer firmware stop reallocated sectors?

Or have I just got some drives from a bad batch (they were manufactured towards the end of 2009).

celliott · 24 Oct 2010 at 17:38

So are you having issues with Seagate drives or Samsung drives? Sounds like seagate to me, title is a bit missleading.

We get through loads of Seagate 7200.12 and their latest ES.2 drives at work failing within less than 6 months of use. Seagate are shockingly bad nowerdays, I would never ever buy a seagate drive again. Seen lots with reallocated sectors, as you quite rightly pointed out this shouldn't be happening.

From what I have seen they are unreliable drives in general, I doubt its a bad batch.

spirits247 · 24 Oct 2010 at 17:56

Yeah sorry - totally had a brain fart on the title. Doh!

I've changed it, but the title never updates on the forums main display so now I'm left to look stupid!

Thanks for the response celliott. I will be sticking to Samsung now, with the occasional WD.

thingemajib · 24 Oct 2010 at 18:09

ive seen CC38 being mentioned a lot for these drives, but i cant seem to find a download anywhere...

im on CC35 on a certified repaired 500gig 7200.12 which i picked up in oct. Never had any problems, but then again i dont run these kinda tests that often.

spirits247 · 24 Oct 2010 at 18:15

Not sure about the older releases, but the latest releases are on the Seagate site:

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=213891&NewLang=en

I haven't updated yet, as I don't want to lose performance. If the sector count keeps on rising however, I might out of desperation. Or I might just let it fail SMART and their diagnosis software so I can send it to Seagate for RMA.

It certainly makes sure I run regular backups to my external Samsung e-sata drive!

spirits247 · 1 Nov 2010 at 23:10

Well, one of the drives reallocated another sector today and the count rised from 63->64. It was obviously going to slowly keep doing this, depending on usage pattern but the thing passes Seagate’s diagnosis software.

So I bit the bullet and decided to flash both CC34 drives to the latest CC46. I followed the instructions and advice of others, downloaded the bootable ISO rather than use the Windows version and set my drives back from AHCI to IDE (not sure if that was required, but it said you can't use RAID mode).

Both drives flashed without incident. However, now one of them with the 64 reallocated sectors fails to respond after about 10 seconds in Windows. Sometimes won't detect on boot. I think the new firmware was too much for it as it already had a slow degrading issue. Good riddance, the thing was a ticking timebomb.

The second drive runs fine and actually to my surprise has a faster seek time not slower as reported by others, so perhaps they fixed that in this latest firmware. It reads better with much fewer access retries according to HDTune random read test. Perhaps it will survive, since it did only reallocate 1 sector as opposed to the other drive which kept on creeping up to 64.

So, I will send this piece of crap into Seagate for RMA, if it's not too expensive to do so. I'm off to buy a Samsung 1TB F3.

Never before have I had such a bad experience with brand new hard drives. If only I never waited a year or so to use them (originally they were sat in my unused Media PC) - I would have sent them back to OCUK straight away!