Seagate 500GB hard drive with bad sectors

[marquezzzzz]

Hello,

I have a 500GB Seagate hard drive (ST3500320AS) with 206 bad sectors and increasing day by day, that's what Hard Disk Sentinel tells me.
This drive is the second 500GB one I have because the first one died due to the famous firmware problem and I replaced it by doing an RMA.
The curious thing is that I have run all the tests with the Seagate Disc Tools utility, both the short test and the long test, and it passed them without any problems. What I really fear is that the drive will stop working any day (I have already made a copy of all the content), could I do an RMA to have it replaced (the drive is under warranty until 2013).

The doubt is, with 206 bad sectors can I do an RMA?

Regards and thanks

[cobito]

Having a hard drive with a few bad sectors is not necessarily especially problematic, as SMART will move the information to a good region before the sector becomes unreadable. The problem arises when the sectors become unreadable and SMART cannot do its job. In that case, the drive is marked as defective and the Seagate utility should return an error code to process the RMA.

[pablotombi]

Hello.
Do you know if the bad sectors on the disk are due to magnetic errors or material defects on the disk?
If it is the first type, you can fix them with the hdd regenerator and if they are the second type, you can make the computer skip those sectors and thus avoid them so that the computer does not slow down, you can use a program called: Seagate Seatools Graphical.
If they do not work for you, try taking it to RMA.

[Sylver]

Hello

Check it with Crystal Disk Info, it will tell you if it's at risk or not, and if it's under warranty I think you can try to process an RMA claiming it's dying too fast.

Best regards

[marquezzzzz]

With DiskInfo it tells me that it is at risk, there are 206 defective sectors, I have run several disk tests and it passes them without problems, even with HDD Regenerator (which basically serves to repair defective sectors) it detects nothing, a bit strange.

I will wait until it fails, although I will make copies just in case.

Sl2

[Fassou]

I have the same model of HDD, and it marks 36 as the limit of bad sectors to start beeping, and you say you have 206 :facepalm:

Check the memory anyway, don't be marking sectors due to read errors and it being the RAM

Salu2!

PD: mine came back from the dead thanks to a Nokia USB cable ;D

[marquezzzzz]

@Fassou:

I have the same model of HDD, and it marks as the limit of bad sectors to start beeping, 36, and you say you have 206 :facepalm:

Check the memory anyway, you might be marking sectors due to reading errors and it's the RAM

Salu2!

PD: mine came back from the dead thanks to a Nokia USB cable ;D

How? can it give errors on the disk (bad sectors) due to problems in the RAM?
And then why doesn't it happen on all the hard drives I have on my computer?

I've run HardDisk Sentinel from another PC and it shows the same errors (206).

Sl2

[Obione]

Make an image of the disk or of what you want to save and pass it to seatools DOS to see if it is necessary to process an RMA.

[marquezzzzz]

@Obione:

Make an image of the disk or of what you want to save and pass it to seatools DOS to see if it's time to process RMA.

I have already done that and with SeaTools it passes all the tests without problems, in fact the disk works correctly.

What worries me the most is that the errors continue to increase, a couple of days ago they were 204 and yesterday it went up to 206 errors, and apart from that the Hard Disk Sentinel tells me that the disk has less than 70 days of life left.

Greetings and thanks

[Fassou]

@marquezzzzz:

How? can it give errors on the disk (bad sectors) because of problems in the ram?

When reading a file, it puts it in memory, and if a corruption failure occurs and when you read it again it repeats, it can mark it as defective

That's why in some cases, sector recoverers seem to do magic :troll:

If it doesn't happen on any other HDD and you pass a Memtest, forget about the issue ;D

Regarding the HDD that kills sectors, maybe it's a head that's scratching the platter, but SeaTools should give you an error code, and SMART should alert you.

Salu2!

[marquezzzzz]

@Fassou:

When reading a file, it loads it into memory, and if a corruption failure occurs and it repeats when you read it again, it can mark it as defective

That's why in some cases, sector recoverers seem to do magic :troll:

If it doesn't happen on any other HDD and you pass a Memtest, forget about it ;D

Regarding the HDD that kills sectors, it might be a head that's scratching the platter, but SeaTools should give you an error code, and SMART should alert you.

Salu2!

Well I didn't know that if the memory fails it can cause bad sectors on the disk.

As for the Memtest, I've run it for over an hour without any failures.

I'm not sure if even if SeaTools doesn't show any failures I can process an RMA

Saludos

[cobito]

@marquezzzzz:

Well I didn't know that if the memory fails it can cause bad sectors on the disk.

As for Memtest, I ran it for over an hour without any errors.

I'm not sure if even though SeaTools doesn't show any errors I can process an RMA

Regards

I have the same question. I have a 1TB dd that was quite damaged. I ran HDD Regenerator several times and I managed to save it completely but there are about 15 sectors that jump with "Delay", which are totally functional but could fail in the future.

[Fassou]

If an HDD under warranty is failing, you are entitled to an RMA, although when you do not deal directly with the one who sold it to you, there is always the fear that they will be strict with the failure ratio and return it ¬¬. As happens with dead pixels on TFTs.

When it comes to running the warranty directly with the manufacturer, and you do not have a code from the diagnostic program, the best thing is to send an email to the brand's support to comment on it, so that they can suggest some test that confirms the problem, or in some cases, one that aggravates the failure so that it falls within the warranty parameters.

Salu2!