[ale] OT. Dead harddrive on laptop

[JD]

On 01/24/2012 01:10 PM, Ron Frazier wrote:
> 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.
> 

Seagate lost me a few years ago with their botched firmware and lack of honesty
in handling the issues.

I looked for 5 yr warranty 7200 rpm HDDs recently - they either do not exist
anymore or are too expensive (2x price) of other HDDs.  3 yr seems to be the new
warranty standard for non-cheap HDDs. I definitely have at least 6 seagates
spinning here now - all with 5 yr warranties that have not expired. I do not
expect to replace them with Seagates when the time comes. I have a long memory.

As to SMART data - the relocated sectors is the main concern. If that number is
growing, the disk is headed for a failure - sooner than later.  Every HDD will
fail eventually. The goal is to be finished using it before the failure or to
have it only used for unimportant data when the failure happens.