Hi, to check bad sectors you could use HDD regeneration software. If you use the seagate tools for DOS you will found that it repairs the disc without notification, so you will not even see how many sectors, or where they were (at the begining, middle or end of the surface) as I think bad sectors could be due to surface oxidation, wich will affect in long / low term tho the rest of the surface (or also as a bad logic desing, as it try to write faster than it can, maybe the cause of such good benchmarks).
I had the same problem, with two st3500320AS (bought separately and with 6 month of diference) and with another ST3750330AS.
Tech support told me to send the drive back to them and they will send me drives with another firmware (different from SD15 that I had), so I ask them to send me the firmware, and I´m wating for notice.
It´s a shame seagate was the best hdd maker since I´ve ever know, first maxtor was the best, then seagate took is place, and now because of a poor quality test, or deficient engineering (that prefers performance than stability), it let his place to WD apparently the best now, but not for speed or performance, but for good speeds (not as much as seagate) and more compatible device (I m not the only one who experimented troubles with 7200.11 SATA drives).
Well the disc was running on an Asus P4P800 Deluxe, also tryed with Epox P4PDAI and same problems
the first 500gb 7200.11 was running fine 3 months, then it gains a bad sector, it starts running low (3MBps as much), seagate tools for windows fails on every test, and that the "GREAT" software provided by seagate (free to download, liying customers that it will repair the disc afther confirmation!! false) seagate tools for DOS repairs without confirmation, so I get an awesome 3 months old disc, with highs speed, lot of exceptional reviews, low temperature sourface, not so low noice levels as everybody sais, and a great bad sector repaired by a software that maybe has simply remove this sector from the file table of the hdd, and it doesn´t told me wich sector it was neither!! REALLY BAD SOFTWARE, AND TO MUCH LIES SAYING THAT THE SOFTWARE IS A DIAGNOSTIC TOOL, WICH WAITS FOR USER CONFIRMATION. I think seagate was planning to save lot´s of money forcing users to "repair" automaticaly the disc at home, also I heard the rma returns a refurbished disc. So maybe, and I repeat MAYBE, a productive director´s team desing a pararel production of bad quality hard disc drives, and repair disc of rma returned wich as I read are many more that a high end manufacturer should expect. Always taking advantage of the name of the brand, like maxtor or seagate that in a near past were the best of the best hdd manufacturer, both with 5 years real waranty, returning new units, both fighting for the high end market. I wonder if maxtor was bought by seagate after or before it becames a low end hdd brand.
Now it seems like Western Digital is the best choise to do, but I wonder if it will be as good as it should, or just not as worst as the others...
Thanks for reading, and maybe if you have something to say, I will be glad reading you people, both systems I try has ICH5 (one was ICH5R) so probably it was the result of a non compatible southbridge chipset, or SATA 1 incompatibility, but everywhere I look, I doesn´t found a patern on seagate feailures, and nothing about incompatibilty (Those drives has also a jumper that limit the transfer rate as SATA 1 so they certainly support SATA 1)
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