Failure Rate of Seagate Momentus 7200.1?

I just read about a problem concerning Ubuntu and most likely other OS's and some manufacturer's extreme APM settings for their harddrives.

Here's my readings:
190 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 059 047 045 Old_age Always - 690159657
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 1669901
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 041 053 000 Old_age Always - 41 (Lifetime Min/Max 0/13)

Should I call up Lenovo to tell them of the problem or just wait until it fails? I have the 2 year thinkpad protection.

 

If you are worried about the HDD's health, run the Seatools diagnostics.

I would trust that to do a better job in checking the HDD than other software since it is the manufacturer's own utility.

John

 

why not run thinkvantage it has pc doctor my disk ibm failed i phone them up they ship me a new disk over night just tell them fail they daig and they ship new one with return box for old one

 

I just ran the short generic test and it passed. Currently running the generic long test. Are there any other tools to test the health? I ran the BIOS test and it passed.

 

I'm not running Windows (Ubuntu instead). Not sure they have thinkvantage for linux...

 

I think you're getting bad information. I've had my 100GB Seagate 7200.1 drive since shortly after they came out. I've had it my ThinkPad running Linux. Currently it resides in my Mac running Leopard. I've never had a problem with it, nor have with the Seagate 7200.2 drive that is currently in my ThinkPad.

 

As I've posted in another thread or two, I'm not convinced that programs which read the SMART data always understand it correctly. Three years back I tried ActiveSMART with a Seagate HDD (I think I installed it because the HDD was running hot) and it predicted death within a few weeks because of a high raw read error count. Seatools could find no problem and the HDD lived happily ever after.

John

 

That's a relief. It just passed the generic long test. What other tests in the SeaTools should I run?

 

the 7200.1 got a bad rap because of a marble dropping noise issue. The ones that did have this problem seem to park the head erratically and this might cause the drive to fail earlier than it should.

If you have this noise issue, get the drive swapped out by lenovo or ibm. If not it should be fine. I had the issue and lenovo sent me a hitachi instead.

 

I've had that noise all along and for some reason I thought it was normal. Do you have a link regarding this from Lenovo?

 

marble dropping noise has been an issue with seagate drives since around 2005 to end of 2007. Mac mini users (as well as several others) have reported the same problem

i've heard that seagate does not consider it a fault although newer versions of the 7200.1 do not have this problem. there was supposed to be a firmware to fix it but i have not seen one. Other than that seagate has been pretty hush-hush on the matter

lenovo doesnt really care. as long as you are under warranty, they will ship you out a new drive. they usually let you pick. just have the fru you want ready.

I had two choices, get another 7200.1 or go with the hitachi 7k100. I went with the hitachi. You get a 3 year manufacturer warranty vs the 5 with seagate, but the 7k100 slightly outperforms the 7200.1 in almost every category

http://laptoplogic.com/reviews/detail.php?id=80&part=full&page=8


what made me change out the drive was the fact that seagate had versions of the 7200.1 that worked great (no marble drop noise) but would not own up to the fact that is a defect. Hard drive arent supposed to sound like THAT period. I dont give a damn about the design. if it was designed that way, all 7200.1 would make that noise


plus the general consensus (from all the forums I been researching this on) is that the noise seems to be the head parking itself. This just doesn't seem good in the long run.

if you're under warranty, get it swapped out.

edit: sorry for the thread hijack, i'll leave it be

 

in brevity and said with all love in the world: i enjoy my 7200.1 since the first day i bought it 1 1/2 years ago. it made my dell inspiron 8600 run like a tiger compared to my old 40gb hitachi drive. and i use my laptop about 8h++ per day in average, 7 days a week. and i'm not really careful anymore with my old lappy ;-)

 

I'm not sure about Hitachi, but Seagate doesn't extend a warranty to end users on hard drives sold to OEM's. And yes, they do track the serial numbers.

My 7200.1 in my T60 made the sound from the start, but never tested bad with any diagnostics until it's heads crashed a couple weeks in. Unfortunately the Hitachi drive they replaced it with was much warmer and louder, but these things shift back and forth every generation. Right now I'd opt for a Samsung or WD, but I don't know if Lenovo is using either.

 

Thanks for your help, I'll probably get another Seagate as I haven't any problems with them so far. Also, keep in mind that the benchmarks in the link are of the PATA versions so the SATA drives may perform differently

 

Your load cycle count is comically high. For some reason different OS's really enjoy to park the heads if the drive is even idle for a second, and I saw it first hand on my Apple TV after I upgraded the HD. The drive that came out had ~4000 parks for about 2 days of use, and the new drive going in had something like 20-30k after a month. The drive that came out went into a USB enclosure for backups and extra storage, and under windows never saw any additional parking problems. It got one for each power cycle, but that was to be expected. The drive left in the Apple TV is still climbing sky high.

While some SMART values can have translation problems or be interpreted in different wants (error correction, remapped sectors, etc) things like Power On, load cycles, power cycles, and temperature are consistent across the board regardless of brand or model. Some might count in seconds instead of hours, but you deal with the math on that.

Anyways though, your drive is about 3x over the rated lifetime of load cycles, and if it were my drive it would go into a spare USB enclosure to never really be trusted for any important data. AS the head surfaces start to wear I wouldnt be surprised if you started seeing read/write errors soon.

 

My R61 is still under warranty. Do I call Lenovo for a replacement? I've starting to get random freezes, but I'm not sure if I can contribute them to the harddrive's apparent wear.