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errors in gsmartcontrol

Posted: Tue May 13, 2014 8:20 am
by rozali
hi there,

I recently bought a new WD caviar black 1tb and after 2-3 weeks of normal use i tried a gsmartcontrol and i receive this...
i have 3 partition in this disk 1ext4 with linux and 2 more with ntfs but without O.S only for storage usage.
is it normal???
is it a reason to worry about??

p.s i run gsmart just after petra installation and everything was fine without any problem.

Mint cinnamon 16 petra 64bit
Athlon 2 x4 640
m4a88t-v evo usb 3.0
nvidia gforce 8500gs 256mb

Re: errors in gsmartcontrol

Posted: Tue May 13, 2014 8:47 am
by eanfrid
Backup your data and replace the disk. Reallocated sectors mean an on-going (unpredictably total) hardware failure.

Re: errors in gsmartcontrol

Posted: Tue May 13, 2014 12:52 pm
by austin.texas
I believe eanfrid may be right.
I am using 3 hard drives that have all been in use for many years.
The 250GB has 36 Reallocated Sectors. The 500GB has 1 Reallocated Sector. The 160GB has 0 Reallocated Sectors.

Re: errors in gsmartcontrol

Posted: Tue May 13, 2014 1:18 pm
by eanfrid
For example: I recently bought 2 disks. First unit, 9 months ago, a 1 TB last generation Seagate HDD... within around 100 hours of running time, after a big file copy operation the disk unexpectedly collected 300 reallocated sectors. Now, each time I power it on, it loses (reallocates) ~ 30 sectors. Today it has more than 3000 reallocated sectors and is still running only for experimental and curiosity purpose :mrgreen: Second unit, a 500 GB Western Blue HDD; after only 25 running hours I had more than 500 reallocated sectors => replaced under warranty by the reseller.

All aging disks tend to lose (reallocate) sectors sooner or later. On a fresh new unit, reallocations are always caused by a malfunction and/or a hardware failure. Install and setup the package named "smartmontools". It will monitor your disk and send you an alert when something goes wrong. No alarm does not mean that the disk is actually healthy but on the contrary, alarms are always predicting a more or less imminent total failure.

Re: errors in gsmartcontrol

Posted: Wed May 14, 2014 1:53 pm
by rozali
ok i have already installed the smartmontools ...
i will waiting until the disk stops working and then i ll take it back to the shop for replacement.
4 years and 11 months guarranty left...

Re: errors in gsmartcontrol

Posted: Thu May 15, 2014 6:39 am
by eanfrid
Ahem... further reallocated sectors (and other errors) mean potential - and probably invisible until it is too late - data corruption and unrecoverable errors. Unless you keep your drive for "science" purpose as a secondary (unreliable) external drive like I do, you should not still use it for actual main system storage. If the drive is part of a computer that you use for everyday work, you need to replace the drive ASAP.

Re: errors in gsmartcontrol

Posted: Thu May 22, 2014 6:58 am
by rozali
god damned it i cant go to the shop which i bought it again...
i will using it until it is dead and i dont save staff there i dont want to loose (my personal photos , files etc).
i just wondering if it is a linux fail cause it is the second black caviar hdd which happend this in linux in a period of 3 years i using it...
i have another black caviar on a win7 machine which is in a perfect state of health and has the same age with the first hdd i bought on linux...

Re: errors in gsmartcontrol

Posted: Thu May 22, 2014 7:45 am
by eanfrid
It is only bad luck. Do not not blame the messenger delivering bad news...

Did you install a SMART monitoring tool on Windows, too ? If you did not, Windows will never warn you about anything until the HDD dies: chkdsk tests occur only on the logical layer when file system errors are detected.

Re: errors in gsmartcontrol

Posted: Thu May 22, 2014 7:55 am
by rozali
hahaha you are right...
its not the messengers fault.
maybe i go back to the shop to change the hdd again when the mint 17 arrives... 8)