Problematic Seagate 500g on w520 model: ST9500420AS (reallocated event count warning!)

[PeterTWJ]

Hi maortl

I have an experience with Toshiba MK5061GSY on my W520 before being replaced to ST9500420AS. From my experience, Toshiba / Fujitsu HDD are far poorer, it is noisier and slower and it last in my W520 for almost 2 months before it dies. (Mechanical Failure)

Now, my 2nd HDD ST9500420AS seems getting slower day by day, access to different folders are slow even after Check Disk (chkdsk /f) with no problem with the file systems and Defragmentation completed. I wonder would it helps or worsen if I refresh / restore my systems? Accessing to folders can take 1 to 2 seconds...

Peter

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Refunded Set: W510, 4876-A11

Current Set: W520, 4284-A99

Dolby Home Theater v4!

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/W520-Sound-Enhancement-Thread/m-p/451401#M1551... 

[ColonelONeill]

@PeterTWJ,
Did you check the reallocation count on it?

My stock Fujitsu drive with my T400 was really quiet, although it was 5400RPM. Surprisingly, it's sequential read speeds were close to that of the Scorpio Black.

[PeterTWJ]

@ColonelONeill
Reallocation sector count are consistently 100. Have not tried Hitachi so far. WD Scorpio Black (500GB 7200RPM) was fast indeed and Scorpio Blue is great too on my parents laptop.

I experienced 3 (Toshiba / Fujitsu) laptop hdd failure.
Fujitsu (60GB) - 8 months
Toshiba (100GB) - 2 years+
1 from W520, Toshiba (500GB 7200RPM) - 2 months.
Perhaps it's the user (Me) not compatible with that particular brand / hardware?.

At home, I have a Seagate 40GB in P4 desktop hdd which last me 8 years before mechanical failures, a C2D desktop with Seagate 160GB running 3 years + and still running fine. Anyway, does Seagate standard drop that much compared to last time?

Thanks

Peter

=============================================
Does someone’s post help you? Give them kudos as a reward, as they will do better to improve 

Mark it as solved if the solution works for you, so it could be reference for others in the future 

Refunded Set: W510, 4876-A11

Current Set: W520, 4284-A99

Dolby Home Theater v4!

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/W520-Sound-Enhancement-Thread/m-p/451401#M1551... 

[rgeorge68]

Hi. I'm too experiencing the same on my W520 and ST9500420AS. You say Reallocation means weak or failed sectors but only that event counter increases neither ‘reallocated sector count’ nor ‘current pending sector’ does (at least In my case they don’t). So I’m not sure there’re bad sectors. The increase is quite in sync with power on time count (in my case event count is 90, power on time count is 97).

Seagate has some truth in saying they trust only Seatools. SMART values initially are raw values, then they cooked by the HDD as current, worst and threshold values. According to SMART, if a value is above the threshold, the HDD is ok. Reallocation event count’s cooked value is 100 in my case which is the initial value, so the cooked value never changed. Only the lower bytes of the raw value increase and many HDD test programs (HD Tune, HD Sentinel, Acronis Drive manager) interpret these lower bytes as the actual event counter and derive their evaluation upon this. Unfortunately Seagate’s answer to my inquiry to resolve this was a reference to SMART definition and SeaTools.

BTW speed is not affected by even a large amount of reallocated sectors because modern HDD’s got spare tracks in between ordinary ones not at the end of the disc as earlier models.

[ColonelONeill]

I wouldn't trust a drive with any reallocated sectors. Make sure you backup a lot.

[Mark_Lenovo Administrator]

I think backup advisories are fair, but I think we should be careful not to get too polarized in the discussion  - reallocations are a way that a drive can deal with degraded areas and to me, so long as there aren't a lot of constantly occuring, it seems a normal course of events over time.

While we want to encourage people to safegard their data, we don't want to create paranoia or endless debate over confidence in supplier choice or test program results, right?

Best regards,

Mark

[ThorsHammer]

Is there any way to prove/disprove failure rates for storage devices?

Or put another way, does a nuetral third party exist that measures fail rates?  Where does Seagate and the 500GB drives Lenovo has been using rank?

[rgeorge68]

My notebook and HDD are 20 days old so it is not only constantly occuring but from the start. From a Seagate support personel I got some disturbing answers about this reallocation event count, he said it has a upper limit of 300 (number of spare sectors on this HDD). There are doubts as to the accuracy of this information, maybe he was confusing event count with sector count although I told every detail about my HDD. But if he's right, this HDD will trip SMART in two weeks or so.

Fortunately this W520 of mine is a highly supported notebook and at such an early time the service will replace my Seagate to a Hitachi. Hope better luck with that.

[rgeorge68]

A hint to this problem: according to HD Sentinel's collected HDD reports, Seagate HDD-s do not even report this Reallocation Event Count SMART value unless they have Lenovo firmware (the actual proof is for ST9500325AS. 500GB, 5400RPM, but this must be right to ST9500420AS as well).