Anyone own a Seagate Momentus Hard Drive?

Does anyone own a seagete momentus drive and/or an M3Np? Seagate is a great company, with excellent warranty support (and 5 years of it with each drive!!), not to mention awesome drives with excellent performance and capacity, but I don't know what's going on.

I bought a 40gb 5400rpm seagate drive with 8mb cache, and when i used speedfan to check it, it reported a "!" on raw read error rate... the performance bar at the bottom was 100% and the fitness bar was at around 40%... then it started dropping, until it hit around 36%. It stayed there for a 3 weeks, and then one time i downloaded bit torrent and started downloading a bunsh of torrents at the same time (on a fast 10mbit connection) so there was a lot of concurrent read/write/accesses ... and within an hour of that, it failed.

i called up seagate, and 36 hours later, i had my new drive. installed everything, and then took it to my first class... it wouldn't start up! took it home and there was screeching metal sounds... so that was obviously dead. 36 hours later i get another one, and this one was simular to the first one with the dropping "fitness" and "!" sign near raw read error rate. This drive however, started at 45% fitness and dropped down to around 30% before it failed 3 monthes later.

This was april 1st of this year. So i got a temporary fujitsu 60gb (cuz seagate made me send back my dead drive before i'd recieve a new one... temporarly didn't have advanced replacement i guess). The fujitsu drive was 100% on fitness and performance. No problems at all (it was a 60gb 4200rpm drive with 2mb, i think). Seagate was taking a long time, so i called them up last friday and they appologized and send me their best 100gb drive!I was very impressed!

Just put it in and norton ghosted everything onto it (after 4 drives u get smart about it and start using programs like ghost!) Now i see it's got a "!" at raw read error rate and performance is 100% and fitness is 39%! I can't believe that i'm having this bad luck! I've had many many hard drives over the years, and built many computers! I don't understand what's going on.

I was blaming seagate, but now i don't think it's their fault. I'm starting to wonder is there a possibility that this M3Np is SOMEHOW destroying momentus drives?! Maybe the momentus drives have some kind of security leak (back in the day, controllers used to tell the drive where to lift the head and drop it... so a virus was once made that drove the heads into the platter destorying the drives..) and the drive isn't protecting itself from invalid commands by this motherboard. I know it's a far fetch, so that's why i'm asking if anyone has this hardware combination, or at least a momentus drive and could comment on it? i'm gonna contact a senior technition at seagate about this problem and see if we can figure out what's going on.

anyway, thanks for any and all comments....

Asus M3NP 1.5GHz Centrino (Dothan /w 2mb L2)
1GB PC2700 DDR
100gb 5400rpm 8mb Cache Seagate Hard Drive /w 5 Year Warranty
Intel 2200BG 802.11g Wireless

 

I have been using the Momentus 5400.1 for the past 6 months and moved it over from a Sony S2 to my Asus W3A a few days ago.

I have had had no cause for concern about the performance of this HDD. However, after reading the above comments I tried using SpeedFan and got similar (unfit) results.

SiSoftware Sandra reports large numbers of Raw Read Errors, but the count is the same as the ECC Corrected Errors.

I have also tested the drive using SeaTools from http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/ . This found everything to be OK, and I currently have no concerns about the drive performance (I think the HDD index was 31MB/s when I ran the Sandra benchmark last week - comfortably up where it should be).

So perhaps the reported fitness problem is caused by a minor compatibility between the computer and the HDD, but does not affect the performance.

John

 

It is normal, just like on the Desktop.
There is always one value with a ! and it makes fitness lowers than it really is.

 

well that's certainly reassuring. I also noticed the ECC corrected is the same value. I honestly wouldn't have posted this, cuz I know these drives are awesome and seagate has been very good to me!! However, the thing that alarmed me is that the fitness kept creeping lower, and again, I'd ignore it if it weren't for the fact that every single drive ACTUALLY FAILED!

I don't care if speedfan told me I have 0% fitness, as long as the drive performed well. I really like this 100gb drive! It's the biggest laptop drive (and fastest performing in that segment). It's also incredibly quiet!! I just wish I would last. Anyway, I have one more exam today, and then tommorow I'm gonna get ahold of a senior technition at seagate and see if we can figure out what's going on.

I'll keep ya'll posted...

Asus M3NP 1.5GHz Centrino (Dothan /w 2mb L2)
1GB PC2700 DDR
100gb 5400rpm 8mb Cache Seagate Hard Drive /w 5 Year Warranty
Intel 2200BG 802.11g Wireless

 

alright, i called seagate tech support and the guy agreed that it couldn't be just the hard drive cuz they typically never have a user with more than 2 bad drive (and this is my 4th drive!) However, he couldn't suggest anything as to the reason asside from the obvious things: 1) heat 2) strong magnetic interference 3) intense physical shock

I can monitor temperatures of my chipset, CPU, extern diode on heatsink and hard drive temps with my m3, and they're all very reasonable (my centrino doesn't get 6-8 hours of battery life by being a furnace, [ ]) I do have a nice sound system (Logitech Z-560, which is the same as the Z-680s minus the center channel), but my sub stays down below, and furthermore I had a fugitsu hard drive and it had no problems at all.

so all i can think is that perhaps, just perhaps, when Speedfan checks the smart status of my drive, that it signals the hard drive controller to do something VERY STUPID! This really seems the most logical (though VERY WIERD) cuz John said he had a (!) sign when he ran it. Furthermore, i've had this drive plugged into my desktop as well as my external USB controller and it was having the problem with them... which is not even related to my laptop!

I can't find anything on the net related to this topic, so i assume most users are ignorant of their SMART status, which is to their benifit cuz their drives aren't failing. So this ultimatly a firmware issue with Seagates hard drives, unless anyone else can make it do the same with another drive. So i'm gonna send an email to Alfredo Milani (the maker of speedfan) and ask him if he's ever had anyone ask him something like this. However, John also said Sandra reported the same thing... so it could be any program that checks smart status (except for seagate tools)!!

John, if your drive fails within the next few months, PLLLLEASSEE REPOST! I hope it doesn't happen (as i hope my new 100gb drive doesn't fail) but if it does, we need to let seagate know (if they'll listen) that we think we've found a firmware vulnerability.

Asus M3NP 1.5GHz Centrino (Dothan /w 2mb L2)
1GB PC2700 DDR
100gb 5400rpm 8mb Cache Seagate Hard Drive /w 5 Year Warranty
Intel 2200BG 802.11g Wireless

 

I just purchased the same drive and installed it on my ECS Notebook.

I used speedfan and the fitness rating is 36%. Also the raw read error is listed as questionable.

My prior drive was a fujitsu MHR 2040AT and was in service for some time and it had a fitness rating of 85%.

This does concern me.

 

i read a big article about how speedfan determines fitness, and according to how seagate deals with the SMART data (they're a bit off standard) it is very common to have a fitness level below 100% (but performance should stay at 100%). I checked my desktop seagate drive and it reported 46%. However, what's concerning me is the (!) sign near the raw read error rate and how it's increasing and how my fitness keeps decreasing. My desktop drive is static and never changes, nor does it have any such values.

Anyway, all i can suggest is always back up, and just not run speed fan smart features, just incase it happens to make the momentus drives do wacky things that lead to self destruction. And if your drive happens to fail, PLEASE report back here so we can collectively report this as a vulnerability of the drives.

Thanks for your input ensco

Asus M3NP 1.5GHz Centrino (Dothan /w 2mb L2)
1GB PC2700 DDR
100gb 5400rpm 8mb Cache Seagate Hard Drive /w 5 Year Warranty
Intel 2200BG 802.11g Wireless

 

go post on storagereview.com; i go there for all my HDD needs.

 

SiSoftware Sandra and Speedfan give completely different numbers for some of the SMART parameters. So I have downloaded and installed Active SMART from http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/ to get a third opinion.

Active SMART gives the same SMART values as SpeedFan, but has a different interpretation. It thinks that everything is OK (blue) except for the temperature (red), which has been up to 57°C. I think I have commented elsewhere that this HDD runs much hotter in the W3 than in the Sony S, where it previously lived.

John

 

All Seagate drives report theese raw read errors but they are all corrected so it isn't a problem. I think all harddrives have theese errors but not all manufacturers choose to report them like Seagate does. With Active Smart you can see the maximum nr of allowed errors. If you are well below this limit you should be ok.
But since your drives fail there seems to be a problem. Do you ever get a SMART bios warning that says the drive is about to fail?

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by Tobias

 

Know this is an old thread, but it seemed right to add my comments here.

I have been trying to install a 160GB drive on my Dell notebook which supports only ATA mode. I installed my Hitachi 5K160 disk and the installations of Win Xp and other software went smoothly till I installed Norton GoBack (from SystemWorks). I have been using GoBack for years on my 80GB drive. GoBack crashed at boot with GoBack reporting corruption of it main file gobackio.bin. On removing GoBack, the SpeedFan/ActiveSmart SMART status of the drive seemed to have dropped from 99% to 94% within a day. Being a bit bold, I reinstalled GoBack and this time - the partition table / MBR got corrupted. Deciding, it was a problem with the new hard disk, I purchased a Seagate Momentus 5400.3 disk. On installing Norton, I got a "Load Error! Press any key to reboot" problem. The MBR was gone again.

So the question 1 is, has anyone got a problem in using Norton GoBack on any drive using PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) technology?
Everytime I install GoBack, the MBR gets corrupted. The Symantec chaps are no good.

I solved the present problem by using a partition table editor to change the GoBack file system code of "44" to "07" (NTFS). This booted Windows, but all other partitions were gone. I used testdisk (cgsecurity.com) to analyse my disk and restore the other partitions. However, SpeedFan/Active SMART reported both fitness and performance of this drive as well at 93%. Are these parameters wrong? Its a new drive in the market. Even SeaTools does not work for this drive too well. Can't even detect it and hangs the computer.


Anyone knows how to run GoBack without corruption error?