Brother-in-law gave me 2 Seagate 1tb drives, said "they both worked fine."

 

Drive one: SATA data connector plastic missing. Going to call Seagate on Monday and ask it's it's warranty-able. Probably not, but it's worth a try.

 

Drive two: decided to make a dedicated preclearing machine, so I took an old emachines computer, added an internal sata dock,  and started testing. Ran a standard 3 pass preclear. Something was wrong, ran way slow (reads and writes at 40Meg/sec.); the drive reported 22 previously reassigned sectors, and added one more during the test. Rebooted to windows, installed and ran seagate tools, and it said "Nope, everything's just fine, no reason to RMA it." Ughh. precleared again (1 pass) and it went to 45 sectors reallocated (ran at normal speeds though (100+meg/sec)). Not good. Precleared again (1 pass) again at normal speed, and no additional sectors were reallocated.

 

So now I'm not sure what to do with the 2nd drive.

 

 

Brother-in-law gave me 2 Seagate 1tb drives, said "they both worked fine."

 

Drive one: SATA data connector plastic missing. Going to call Seagate on Monday and ask it's it's warranty-able. Probably not, but it's worth a try.

 

Drive two: decided to make a dedicated preclearing machine, so I took an old emachines computer, added an internal sata dock,  and started testing. Ran a standard 3 pass preclear. Something was wrong, ran way slow (reads and writes at 40Meg/sec.); the drive reported 22 previously reassigned sectors, and added one more during the test. Rebooted to windows, installed and ran seagate tools, and it said "Nope, everything's just fine, no reason to RMA it." Ughh. precleared again (1 pass) and it went to 45 sectors reallocated (ran at normal speeds though (100+meg/sec)). Not good. Precleared again (1 pass) again at normal speed, and no additional sectors were reallocated.

 

So now I'm not sure what to do with the 2nd drive.

 

Drive one: Physical damage usually not covered by warranty.

 

Drive two: Run the seagate tools long diag, after preclear a few more times. Looks to be failing but not dead yet. The badblocks tool is another good process.