Seagate SeaTools for Windows. utter Rubish

[Woger]

Testing a FreeAgent drive and the drive was playing up started to click,
Windows SeaTools Test shows that Drive as 100% but not even showing on the
Desktop, and I tested the drive over and over again still 100%..

BUT after quitting SeaTools and running it again it, then could not find the
drive..

So how can you trust SeaTools..?

 

[Arno]

Testing a FreeAgent drive and the drive was playing up started to click,
Windows SeaTools Test shows that Drive as 100% but not even showing on the
Desktop, and I tested the drive over and over again still 100%..

BUT after quitting SeaTools and running it again it, then could not find the
drive..

So how can you trust SeaTools..?

You cannot?

Arno

 

[Juarez]

So how can you trust SeaTools..?

You can't. I had a similar thing happen with Samsung diagnostics, it never
found a bad sector on one of my HDDs that HDTune found using the long scan.
Quickscan would pass but not the long scan and the HDD was definitely the
culprit for my BSOD at the time.

 

[impossible]

Found the same thing, SeaTools is rubbish.
Profitable rubbish if it doesn't find faults with
drives that should be RMA'd.

If a Seagate drive fails under waranty, Seagate will replace it. End of
story.

 

[Justin Goldberg]

Found the same thing, SeaTools is rubbish.
Profitable rubbish if it doesn't find faults with
drives that should be RMA'd.

It works with any drive, too, so it would seem that it has no special
knowledge of Seagate drives that other drive utilities don't have, imho.
If I'm incorrect please let me know.

 

[impossible]

It works with any drive, too, so it would seem that it has no special
knowledge of Seagate drives that other drive utilities don't have, imho.
If I'm incorrect please let me know.

SeaTools reads SMART data, which can only be interpreted accurately for a
given drive by the drive's manufacturer. The same would apply for any
manufacturer's diagnostic tools. Third-party tools that pretend to know
better are complete and utter frauds.

 

[Franc Zabkar]

SeaTools reads SMART data, which can only be interpreted accurately for a
given drive by the drive's manufacturer. The same would apply for any
manufacturer's diagnostic tools. Third-party tools that pretend to know
better are complete and utter frauds.

A drive manufacturer's diagnostic will pass a drive that has, say, 500
reallocated sectors, but a tool such as HD Sentinel may fail it. In
this particular case I'd fail it, too. I certainly wouldn't trust such
a drive with my data. However, I agree that the raw SMART data don't
always make much sense, unless you know how the manufacturer has
encoded them.

- Franc Zabkar

 

[Woger]

SeaTools reads SMART data, which can only be interpreted accurately for a
given drive by the drive's manufacturer. The same would apply for any
manufacturer's diagnostic tools. Third-party tools that pretend to know
better are complete and utter frauds.

Seagate dose not support SMART reporting on there USB drives, other firms
do..

 

[impossible]

A drive manufacturer's diagnostic will pass a drive that has, say, 500
reallocated sectors, but a tool such as HD Sentinel may fail it.

Reallocated sectors are commonplace, and they do not necessarily signal a
failing frive. In any case, you cannot RMA a drive based on an HD Sentinel
report. Either the drives passes a manufacturer diagnostic or it doesn't.

In this particular case I'd fail it, too. I certainly wouldn't trust such
a drive with my data.

That's why you run daily backups.

However, I agree that the raw SMART data don't
always make much sense, unless you know how the manufacturer has
encoded them.

That's why you're wasting your time with tools like HD Sentinel.

 

[Rod Speed]

impossible wrote

SeaTools reads SMART data,
Yes.

which can only be interpreted accurately for a given drive by the drive's manufacturer.
Wrong.

The same would apply for any manufacturer's diagnostic tools.

Wrong again.

Third-party tools that pretend to know better are complete and utter frauds.

Wrong, as always.

 

[Rod Speed]

impossible wrote

Reallocated sectors are commonplace,
Yes.

and they do not necessarily signal a failing frive.

That many certainly does.

In any case, you cannot RMA a drive based on an HD Sentinel report.
Yes.

Either the drives passes a manufacturer diagnostic or it doesn't.

Legally its much more complicated than that.

That's why you run daily backups.

Pity about the stuff that gets lost between them.

That's why you're wasting your time with tools like HD Sentinel.

Wrong, as always.

 

[Richard]

Reallocated sectors are commonplace, and they do not necessarily signal
a failing frive. In any case, you cannot RMA a drive based on an HD
Sentinel report. Either the drives passes a manufacturer diagnostic or
it doesn't.

No, but you can RMA it if it is haveing issues that get logged by
windows liek delayed write failures, getting kicked out of a raid all
the time, read errors etc. Done it before.

That's why you're wasting your time with tools like HD Sentinel.

They never work when I have tried them anyway. The only controller I can
use smart on here is an onboard that pretends its pata - everything else
will not do smart.

 

[impossible]

No, but you can RMA it if it is haveing issues that get logged by windows
liek delayed write failures, getting kicked out of a raid all the time,
read errors etc. Done it before.

Only if the manufacturer approves, and iun the end they're going to use
their own diagnostic tools to make that decision. Maybe you got a vendor to
take back a poorly performing drive, but if the vendfor then RMA's the drive
to the manufacturer under warranty, you can be sure that the manufacturer
ran their own tests before shipping a free replacement.

They never work when I have tried them anyway. The only controller I can
use smart on here is an onboard that pretends its pata - everything else
will not do smart.

I don't know of any drive manufactured in the last 8-10 years that doesn't
do SMART.

 

[Arno]

SeaTools reads SMART data, which can only be interpreted accurately for a
given drive by the drive's manufacturer. The same would apply for any
manufacturer's diagnostic tools. Third-party tools that pretend to know
better are complete and utter frauds.

Not necessarily. First, there are the manufacturer thresholds. Then
there are experience values that can be better than the thresholds,
for example for reallocated sectors and poending sectors. Also a
third party tool can have a database of disk pecularities.

Interpretation of SMART data has been done in this group for years.
There is not reason at all to put this into a tool.

Arno

 

[Arno]

Reallocated sectors are commonplace, and they do not necessarily signal a
failing frive. In any case, you cannot RMA a drive based on an HD Sentinel
report. Either the drives passes a manufacturer diagnostic or it doesn't.

In practice, you can RMA any drive, even one that is perfectly fine.

Also certain numbers of reallocated sectod do signal a failing drive,
and a steady increase over a certain rate does to. Not with maximum
reliability, but SMART also is about early warning, so a bit of
paranoia is a good idea.

That's why you run daily backups.

That's why you're wasting your time with tools like HD Sentinel.

Not at all. Seem to me you have limited experience with SMART.

Arno

 

[Arno]

Only if the manufacturer approves, and iun the end they're going to use
their own diagnostic tools to make that decision.

Typically they will just replace the drive, testing drives that
come in is far too expensive.

Maybe you got a vendor to
take back a poorly performing drive, but if the vendfor then RMA's the drive
to the manufacturer under warranty, you can be sure that the manufacturer
ran their own tests before shipping a free replacement.

No. And I have sucessfully RMAed drives that started to look like
they had a problem, but were still far from reaching the SMART
thresholds. You just need to find out how to coax a RMA
number from the webpage. On the last drive I just stated that
it had become inaccessible (which it had not).

I don't know of any drive manufactured in the last 8-10 years that doesn't
do SMART.

Finally one good pice of information from you. The only one so far.

Arno

 

[Rod Speed]

Only if the manufacturer approves, and iun the end they're going to
use their own diagnostic tools to make that decision. Maybe you got a
vendor to take back a poorly performing drive, but if the vendfor
then RMA's the drive to the manufacturer under warranty, you can be
sure that the manufacturer ran their own tests before shipping a free
replacement.

I don't know of any drive manufactured in the last 8-10 years that
doesn't do SMART.

Pity about what gets thru the USB bridge.

 

[Rod Speed]

Only if the manufacturer approves, and iun the end they're going to use their own diagnostic tools to make that
decision.

They cant if you say the diag cant see the drive.

Maybe you got a vendor to take back a poorly performing drive, but if the vendfor then RMA's the drive to the
manufacturer under warranty, you can be sure that the manufacturer ran their own tests before shipping a free
replacement.

And you can always just RMA it direct to Seagate.

 

[Mike Ruskai]

So how can you trust SeaTools..?

As the others say, you can't. It was unable to run any tests on a drive
attached via eSATA on both my laptop and desktop. I had to pull my machine
out and jimmy a cable into a spare motherboard connector through a tangle of
cables, while the machine was running (I'm not about to shut down just for
that).

Once connected, I found it was incapable of running SMART tests on any drives.
it just reported a failure each time, even on quite healthy ones. At least it
failed the drive on the short test.

It doesn't seem to matter for getting an RMA, though. Just plug in your model
and serial numbers on the right web page, and you can get one automatically.

I had to do two recently, including the one that had read errors, and one
which shuts down the PSU when the power is plugged in (it killed the original
PSU outright).

 

[Franc Zabkar]

I had to do two recently, including the one that had read errors, and one
which shuts down the PSU when the power is plugged in (it killed the original
PSU outright).

I'll bet the latter had a shorted TVS diode across either the +12V or
+5V rail. If your PSU is OK, then you can desolder this diode and the
drive should work OK without it. This type of fault is discussed quite
frequently in the HD forums.

- Franc Zabkar