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    SMART Status of HDD

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by AlphaQuad1, Jan 6, 2007.

  1. AlphaQuad1

    AlphaQuad1 Notebook Enthusiast

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    I have a Seagate Momentus 5400.3 80GB drive and I've been through 3 of them already. Each one I get the BE (unknown attribute) in the SMART status of HDtune reports it as failed, but other SMART monitoring programs like SpeedFan HardDiskSentinel, ActiveSmart all report the BE value as OK. Does anyone else have this problem and is it a bug of the hdtune program or is it something I have to worry about? I've been through three drives already so any opinions would be appreciated.
    Thanks guys.
    [​IMG]
     
    AlphaQuad1, Jan 6, 2007
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  2. John Ratsey

    John Ratsey Moderately inquisitive Super Moderator

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    It it is any use, HD Tune is reporting the BE vales for my Samsung HM160JI as:

    (BE) (unknown attribute) 62 54 40 772276262 Ok

    Is your only reason for replacing the HDDs because HD Tune is reporting BE as failed? You could get a second opinion about the HDD's health using Active SMART from http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/index.html . However, I would point out that about 18 months ago I was using Active SMART to monitor the health of an HDD (I think it was a Seagate Momentus) which it said was dying on account I very high raw read error rate values. I couldn't see any problems with the performance of this HDD and eventually decided that something was getting confused. The HDD failed to die when predicted and kept going until it was replaced by a bigger one several months later.

    What does Seagate's SeaTools say about the health of the HDD?

    John
     
    John Ratsey, Jan 6, 2007
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  3. Tinderbox (UK)

    Tinderbox (UK) BAKED BEAN KING

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    Tinderbox (UK), Jan 6, 2007
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  4. AlphaQuad1

    AlphaQuad1 Notebook Enthusiast

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    ActiveSMART reports that every value is OK and so does speedfan only HDTune is reporting that value as failed. SeaTools checks out OK. Is it possible HDTune is reporting erroneously? Thanks for the help guys.
     
    AlphaQuad1, Jan 6, 2007
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  5. John Ratsey

    John Ratsey Moderately inquisitive Super Moderator

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    I think it is quite possible that HD Tune is wrongly interpreting the SMART data. As I noted in my previous post, ActiveSMART, which is software specifically for SMART monitoring, was giving me a misleading forecast. I suspect that SMART is not as standard as it should be, with different manufacturers using different data values. I would trust SeaTools unless you have other reasons to assume that the HDD is not performing properly (eg it seems to be slow or is very noisy).

    John
     
    John Ratsey, Jan 6, 2007
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