I ran my SMART test yesterday and one drive came back with high Raw_Read_Error_Rate and Seek_Error_Rate. I am still pretty new to reading the reports and don't want to jump to conclusions. I have attached the SMART test. Could someone let me know if I need to be concerned?

Someone else can correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK those parameters mean nothing on Seagate drives and effectively are only readable (meaningful) to the manufacturer.

Correct. Most of the Raw values are only meaningful to the manufacturer. As long as the normalized VALUE is greater than the THRESH-hold value the disk passes.

Thanks for your replies. I ran the drive with SeaTools on short and long tests and everything passed.

Thanks for your replies. I ran the drive with SeaTools on short and long tests and everything passed.

which by itself, is also meaningless.  I've seen disks with thousands of re-allocated sectors pass smart tests.  For sectors pending re-allocation, and sectors re-allocated, you MUST look at the RAW counts. (they are some of the few that are meaningful to end-users)

 

Joe L.

Thanks for your replies. I ran the drive with SeaTools on short and long tests and everything passed.

which by itself, is also meaningless.  I've seen disks with thousands of re-allocated sectors pass smart tests.  For sectors pending re-allocation, and sectors re-allocated, you MUST look at the RAW counts. (they are some of the few that are meaningful to end-users)

 

Joe L.

 

Agree the results alone are meaningless.  SMART reports are VERY vague ... and none of the manufacturers publish any "easy to read" guides as to the data.    Even the utilities you can buy that track the SMART reports for you don't provide a lot of guidance -- they just give you pass/fail status on the drives.  Much of the data is worthless -- but at least you can tell from the raw data how many re-allocated sectors you have,  how many times the drive's been powered up, head retract counts, etc.

 

Basically, SMART is most useful (in my view) for tracking trends .. i.e. save the SMART data periodically and see if it's changing -- most notably is the re-allocated sector count growing (a bad sign).    Of course, if the SMART report indicates a drive FAILS the SMART test, it's definitely time to replace it !!  [Although I've seen drives that fail SMART continue to work for an extended time -- but I wouldn't want to be using one.]