smallbore wrote:
On 02/05/2018 11:56 PM, Flasherly wrote:
On Tue, 6 Feb 2018 00:28:18 +0000 (UTC), dogs wrote:

I guess those are 500 GB? My smaller ST3160023A has "3 years, 4 months,
and 4 days" Power-On Hours. I think I bought it about 18 years ago.


I don't know how long I ran a some 200G Seagates. One SATA and a PATA
are left out of possibly three maybe four original units. I've backup
data the PATA, at least while MBs continue to provide the interface;-
same for the SATA, which is among storage drives that don't see a lot
of use, except for a powered USB docking stations. It's almost
ludicrous to admit a preferred efficiency I still like about my first
SSD, a Samsung 64G unit. My last 500- to 700G-class, a plattered
Western Digital HDD, though, still bears a brunt of downloadable
material, augmented by a couple other 250G-class SSDs, and organized
accordingingly for strategical advancement a SSD provides. The WD
will be next to go, placed in the dockting-station queue and replaced
by a 500-class SDD.

Another thing comes to mind, re the OP and Statistical Abstracts
provided by IT WEB "drive rankings". HDD manufacturers are neither
unaware of an unfavorable such publicity provides. At times farther
research is indicated, e.g. a HDD manufacturer model may be
subsequently "hidden", as an identifiable model, within and subject to
objectionable characteristics. Another area is updated drive firmware
ROM. One of my 2T drives was manufactured to cycle-out power states
inordinately. Jacking the power cycles, thereby shortening a drive
life span means. . .who needs integrity when spending more of your
money on failed drive replacements is vastly more interesting. The
manufacturer subsequently released a firmware patch to define a
definable maximum for nonintervention of data polling. The firmware
was a direct result from a class action lawsuit against the
manufacturer by the IT sector.

As always, I wonder what you said.

Gnome Disk Utility shows me

Self-test Result - Last self-test completed successfully
Self-assessment - Threshold not exceeded
Overall assessment - Disk is OK

And the assessment for every individual SMART Attribute is "OK" even
while three of the numbers in the table look bad.

Read Error Rate, when I mouse over it, pops a tooltip that tells me
"Frequency of errors while reading raw data from the disk. A non-zero
value indicates a problem with either the disk surface or read/write
heads" The Value column currently shows a staggering 36208573, while the
Assessment column says OK.

Can you help to further confound me? I'm looking forward to it.

The only reliable indicators are Current Pending and Reallocated.
And of those, some drives don't even update Current Pending properly
and it always reads zero.

Reallocated is thresholded, and the drive looks healthy until
a large number of reallocations have occurred. The raw data
field goes from around 0-5500 or so, before the drive
would be considered "dead". It's the growth rate of that
raw data, that gives you some idea how much trouble
you're in. If Monday it says 100, Tuesday says 200, it's
time to do a backup before it is too late...

Raw Errors on a drive are not a problem, because the drive has
error correction and an error corrector polynomial. Again, you're
not in trouble, until the OS says "CRC error" and then you know
that sector/cluster is toast and so is your file resting on it.

The first indication of trouble, is running the free version
of HDTune and doing a transfer rate curve, and seeing a "bad spot"
in the curve for the disk. You will see "trouble" that way,
before Reallocated even goes non-zero. That's the most sensitive
test, even if occasionally it delivers a false positive. Some
drives (for reasons unknown), "perk up" if you write them from
end to end. And then when you run another transfer rate curve,
they look "OK" again. Weird stuff.

Between 42 and 48 here is a "bad spot", but this drive is
generally pretty ****ty. Notice the yellow seek dots are
way up high too, implying multiple rotations to get the data.
I would replace this.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/atta...une-jpg.49651/

This is a good drive. Only a couple of yellow dots are out-of-band.
And the transfer curve, from outer diameter to inner diameter,
shows the normal "zoned recording" pattern. The recording method
varies a bit, from zone to zone, giving a stair-step curve. I would
"give this drive to my mom" it's so nice.

https://overclock3d.net/gfx/articles...085804529l.jpg

The free version of HDTune is here. This version is now ten
years old, but it still works, and is all you need for this
work.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

Paul