I have one old 80GB legacy SATA HDD over 5 years old. I occasionally run the CrystalDiskInfo on Windows. The results are astonishing, specifically the raw values for Current Pending & Uncorrectable Sector count. It reports these as Hex FFFFFFFF that's whooping 4294967295 in Decimal, way way way more than what any 80GB legacy HDD can have as max number of sectors....yet Reallocated Sector count is just too good!!

Could there be some explanation for so high raw values reported?
Thanks.

Impossible> Seagate do not support such large G list table

_________________
All went well until I plugged the drive in.

Is the SMART data corrupted or could it simply be some bug in such reporting tools? It's quite confusing for me to interpret this result.

Use another software application

_________________
All went well until I plugged the drive in.

All tools will report the same 512 bytes of data. However, some might decide to reduce the raw value to 16 bits rather than 32 when they interpret the data. HD Tune reports the value as -1. CrystalDiskInfo actually dumps the raw 512-byte block, as in this example:

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id- ... count.html

AISI, it's some kind of bug, or some kind of signal from the drive to flag an internal problem.

I found the following SMART reports, some of which have the same maxed out value for those same two attributes. One of the drives reports "97 97 0 74", which would suggest that the threshold for the attribute is reached when the number of pending sectors is between 1850 (74 / 4 x 100) and 2467 (74 / 3 x 100). Similary, the Reallocated Sector Count (95 95 36 220) would suggest that the threshold corresponds to a number in the range from 2347 (220/6 x 64) to 2816 (220/5 x 64).

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/s ... 01024.html




http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/27249 ... 200-failed



http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/s ... rakes.html



http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/s ... page2.html

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks for such a detailed explanation! I tried with HD Tune as well and it reports these as –1.
Apparently Seagate’s Seatools for windows reports SMART test outcome as PASS. It does not report actual SMART data as such.

SeaTools is useless as a SMART reporting tool. It only fails an attribute if its normalised value hits the threshold. In this case it appears that the two problematic attributes are not permitted to drop below 1, so they will never trigger a SMART failure.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

http://hddscan.com

Have you tried it?

_________________
All went well until I plugged the drive in.

Why would that make any difference, or are you suggesting that the OP scan the drive?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

That makes sense, but simply using a different tool and expecting it to report different values for those same SMART attributes would be absurd.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

indeed

_________________
All went well until I plugged the drive in.

Seagate probably deems those attributes (197 ( 0xC5 )/198 ( 0xC6 )to be unreliable predictive indicators of drive failure.

_________________
All went well until I plugged the drive in.

Here is just one example of why SeaTools' SMART reporting is at best useless, and at worst deceptive:

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id- ... se-on-page

Notice that if that drive had 4687 seek errors, it would have passed with no warning that anything is wrong, and a surface scan would have turned up nothing.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Guess they want to "Limit" RMA's

_________________
All went well until I plugged the drive in.

As far as I care the only purpose for SMART to exist is just to keep track of whether the drive is reallocating sectors. The rest of the SMART data usually just reports an error after the drive has already failed (which isn't so "smart" in my opinon).

_________________
Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

I'm not sure whether their conclusions would be valid for today's drives, but Google published a study in 2007 that evaluated the usefulness of SMART as a failure predictor in their server farms.

http://static.googleusercontent.com/med ... ilures.pdf

In reading their paper, it's clear that the authors did not understand the meanings of several of the SMART attributes.

For example ...


Obviously they were referring to Seagate.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

would like to know if there's any tool that can do this kind of scan. Thanks.

I have scanned the same drive with MHDD32 and here's the outcome.