How is the S.M.A.R.T Health of my new drive?

[fieryhellz]

Just wondering whether this is okay? I only fitted it yesterday but I have no idea if this is bad. The seek error rate while green seems low for a new drive since my old one is 100. Its a FireCuda 2TB https://i.imgur.com/XaTUq9T.png (I don't really know how S.M.A.R.T works sorry)

 

[Mark RM]

I don't see anything at all to be concerned with there. That looks perfect.

 

[fieryhellz]

I don't see anything at all to be concerned with there. That looks perfect.

Thanks, that's a relief since I thought if its supposed to be 100 if its dropped by 40 then somethings bad.

 

[Mark RM]

here's a decent article that lays out how to read that data
https://www.howtogeek.com/134735/how-to-see-if-your-hard-drive-is-dying/

 

[seagate_surfer]

A resource you'll probably want to keep on hand which scans the drive and tells you if it is healthy or not is our free diagnostic software SeaTools.

Also, since your FireCuda is new, keep in mind that the way the SSD cache works is that, as you use the drive more and more, it learns which data is being accessed most frequently and sticks that on the SSD cache for faster load times, so that's where you'll really see the performance boost with this drive.

 

[fieryhellz]

A resource you'll probably want to keep on hand which scans the drive and tells you if it is healthy or not is our free diagnostic software SeaTools.

Also, since your FireCuda is new, keep in mind that the way the SSD cache works is that, as you use the drive more and more, it learns which data is being accessed most frequently and sticks that on the SSD cache for faster load times, so that's where you'll really see the performance boost with this drive.

Should I be worrying if my Seek Error Rate is increasing constantly? Its now at 300k on smart tests.

 

[Mark RM]

Because it's a seagate drive that field is actually a 48 bits, you have to look at the raw value

the Seek error rate attribute should be converted to hexadecimal and then upper 16 bits are number of errors, while lower 32 bits are total number of seeks.

So of course it looks enormous, because the drive is seeking all the time and that's recorded.

 

[fieryhellz]

Because it's a seagate drive that field is actually a 48 bits, you have to look at the raw value

the Seek error rate attribute should be converted to hexadecimal and then upper 16 bits are number of errors, while lower 32 bits are total number of seeks.

So of course it looks enormous, because the drive is seeking all the time and that's recorded.

I see, I've worked it out to have 44 seek errors and I noticed, every time my hard drive makes a quick "grinding" like sound that value goes up by 1(i guess that's the readjustment). I can't work out whether I should be worried or not.

 

[Mark RM]

no you shouldn't be worried.

To be honest only a very few values should be of concern to you, like the ones described in that linked article, also some don't quite apply the same way because the caching of the SSD changes things slightly.

The Seatools product linked by the rep is quite good at predicting failure and problems, interpreting that data so you don't have to, I trust it.

 

[fieryhellz]

no you shouldn't be worried.

To be honest only a very few values should be of concern to you, like the ones described in that linked article, also some don't quite apply the same way because the caching of the SSD changes things slightly.

The Seatools product linked by the rep is quite good at predicting failure and problems, interpreting that data so you don't have to, I trust it.

Thanks a lot for the replies and your time, im generally a pretty paranoid person (obsessively even) so its good to hear that I shouldn't be worried.

 

[seagate_surfer]

no you shouldn't be worried.

To be honest only a very few values should be of concern to you, like the ones described in that linked article, also some don't quite apply the same way because the caching of the SSD changes things slightly.

The Seatools product linked by the rep is quite good at predicting failure and problems, interpreting that data so you don't have to, I trust it.

Thanks a lot for the replies and your time, im generally a pretty paranoid person (obsessively even) so its good to hear that I shouldn't be worried.

The best cure for HDD paranoia is making sure your back is covered, that you've got a good backup strategy with any important data/any drive, and that you know where to reach out if you need to replace the drive under warranty.

As far as backups, the rule-of-thumb is known as the 3-2-1 strategy. Keep 3 copies of your data, 2 stored locally but on different mediums (storage devices) and one kept offsite in case of disaster. All hard drives, being mechanical devices, do fail, and this is honestly the best thing you can do for yourself to protect your data.

Then, as far as finding out whether or not a drive is under warranty, you can use our Warranty Validation Tool. One of the nice things about the FireCuda is it has a 5 year limited warranty where most desktop-grade drives tend to have 2.