[PLUG] smartmontools test accuracy?

[Scott Garman]

On 04/30/2010 11:25 AM, Dale Snell wrote:
> Is that a Seagate drive, by any chance?  I have a Seagate FreeAgent Go
> USB drive that has similar behavior.  Nothing shows up
> in /var/log/messages, but both  smartctl -a  and Palimpsest show huge
> numbers for raw read error, seek, and hardware ECC correction rates.
> Yet both programs give the drive a healthy status.  For the record,
> here's some of the output of  smartctl -a :

It is in fact a Seagate. The story got even more interesting when I 
noticed the following was in my smartctl -a output:

==> WARNING: There are known problems with these drives,
see the following Seagate web pages:
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207963

That second URL points to a KB article mentioning a critical firmware 
update. You might want to check Seagate's web site in case your drive 
also has "known problems."

I have no idea if updating the firmware on the drive would make it work 
without errors...at this point there's no way I can trust it. It's 
needed for an important  build server, so I won't be taking any chances.

Scott