Are Both my Seagate Drives on the way out? How Bad is this Smart Info

[primetime]

I ran SeaTools on Both and the larger one actually finishing's the long Fix all Drive thing....The smaller one fails to finish successfully. Neither drive has any issue with windows drive error scans so at least thats going for them. The larger one is still under warranty, but i guess i need another drive to back it up before sending it in.

Are these drives ticking time bombs? I might as well invest in high end m2 drives to replace them.

 

[drescherjm]

C6 represents sectors that were written to the disk but could not be read at last try. The raw value is the number of sectors.

I would be more cautious of the 8TB drive.

 

[toast0]

The 2TB drive looks ok to me. 8 unreadable/pending sectors (I don't think C5 and C6 are distinct sector counts, since they're the same for both drives) , but they'd probably reallocate if you wrote to them, and everything else looks ok to me. Almost 5 years of power-on time though, and it's small, so if prices weren't crazy, I'd consider replacing it anyway.

The 8TB drive though; 200 reallocated sectors, and 184 pending; now, I don't know how many sectors are reserved, based on the SMART formated values, you might have a lot left, and I don't know what Seagate's warranty threshold is either, but I'd replace it if possible. If you don't replace this one, you need to at least be monitoring smart on the regular --- ideally something checking every few minutes and alerting you if reallocated/pending sectors changes, but at least a daily check; if you're adding a sector or two a week that's ok (ish), but if it changes to tens of sectors an hour, it's not going to be great. When I was working on a big disk farm, I'd get drives replaced around 100 iffy sectors, although we did have a few disks that were around 1000 sectors that seemed fine (when I got started, they weren't checking smart stats, just replacing disks when filesystem errors happened, it was a lot less exciting when we swapped disks during business hours because the bad sector count was high than when we had to get disks swapped overnight because a bad read crashed the filesystem driver, crashing the OS)

But, it also depends on what you're storing on the drives and what your data redundancy plan is. If it's all immediately replaceable data or you've got 3 copies of it, with par2 to verify and repair errors, you're pretty ok, but know that at least this copy is a little suspect. If this is holding your master's thesis and is the only copy, buy a replacement drive today, copy your data when the new drive arrives, and figure out a redundancy story soon.

If you end up sending the drive into seagate, back it up and wipe it first, assume you won't get that specific drive back, and even if you did, you don't need Seagate looking at your pr0n; they're not going to transfer your data to a new drive either.