[ale] OT. Dead harddrive on laptop

[Ron Frazier]

Hi JD,

It's good to see another Spinrite user.  Those are pretty rare on this 
list.  I've had good results with the product, as I posted in my other 
reply.  I think Rich Faulkner said he'd had some good experience with it 
in another thread long ago.  Just so you know, my experience is that 
Spinrite will produce copious quantities of seek errors with Seagate 
drives.  I actually replaced a drive once because of that.  After 
checking with Spinrite tech support, I was essentially told that it was 
a false alarm and the data on the SMART reporting screen, which this 
was, is sometimes not reliable.  I was told that it's because Steve had 
to reverse engineer the SMART reporting and that there's little 
standardization or documentation in that area.  So, as of now, I pretty 
much ignore seek errors on Seagate drives if everything else is 
working.  Regarding warranties, I always like to look for the drives 
with 5 yr. warranties.  Seagate has always been good to me.  Who knows 
how the industry will recover after the flooding in Thailand.

Sincerely,

Ron

On 1/24/2012 12:48 PM, JD wrote:

<snip>

> Over the next few days, I let spinritehttps://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm  have
> at it on level 4 (toggle all bits) and waited. After about 30 hours the process
> finished. Zero issues. No seek errors, no read failures, no bad sectors.  I'm
> convinced it was just lazy bits in the directory structure that needed to be
> refreshed. That drive will work its way back into backup rotation. I won't trust
> it for primary data, but as a backup drive, it is fine.  I never trusted it for
> primary data anyway - it was a "blue" HDD with a 1 yr warranty.
>    

<snip>

-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
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Ron Frazier

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