S.M.A.R.T. / smart status... what to believe?

[tdipower]

Hi.

I have a seagate 2,5" 320GB 7200.3 disk that I have been using in my 17" HP computer. I have been running Windows and ubuntu 9.04 and everything have been running great.

I now bought my self a Acer D250 and a 500GB 7200.4 Seagate disk. I placed the 500GB in the hp computer, and then formated the 320GB disk and is now using it in my Acer. I'm now running Mint 8 on both computers. The problem is that Mint say the 320GB disk is broken and that it have 54 bad sectors and should be replaced.....

So.... I connected the disk to my stationary computer and ran the seatool smartmonitor. No error.
I have "low level formated the disk with 0's, no error msg.
I have used the HDD regenerator to check for bad sectors, none is found....

I reinstalled Mint, and it say the disk is broken.
I ran the seatool again, nothing, and I have finished a short, a long DST and a long generic test. No errors
Also on the seagate homepage it is stated that thirdparty smart monitors is not to be trusted.
Well, then again, i get a bit sceptic when smart is tripped... and the Normalized, worst and treshold is the same on both the new and old disk, but the value on "value" is 0 on the new and 54 sectors on "Reallocated Sector Count"

Is there any more tests I can run?
Is the disk failing?
What should I do? If I return it, I guess seagate will run seatool and send the disk back to me...

[Brian49]

When you say that Mint tells you that your disk is failing, I take it you mean that the Palimpsest disk-check application tells you that. This application gives accurate enough factual information about sectors on the disk, but its threshold for giving warnings is far too low. It tells me my 250Gb Seagate disk is failing, when there are only 60 "bad" sectors out of 488 million!

Palimpsest is set to run at startup in the default Mint 8 installation. My recommendation is that you remove it from the list of startup applications (it appears there as Disk Notifications), and just consult it for factual information as and when you need it.

[tdipower]

Yes, that's correct. It's the "disk info" in the controlpanel that tells me this, and also as you say tell me on login that the disk is failing. My count is 54 so I guess I just continue use the disk to see if it raise?
I haven't got any valuable data on the disk anyway so... they are on my raid5 and backed up to some externals.