Seagate HDD was dying, should I RMA it?

[kitty]

I have a Seagate ST3300831A. That's a 300GB drive I bought in Christmas of 2005. It's been running in my Linux server 24/7 since I bought it. FYI, that server also has an older Maxtor 200GB and a WD 120GB running in it, no prob.

This past Saturday, I was getting the following message from the SMART monitoring daemon in Linux for the Seagate drive:

Jul 8 19:35:28 linux smartd[1958]: Device: /dev/hdd, FAILED SMART self-check. BACK UP DATA NOW!

And accessing certain parts of data was painfully slow. It got lots of

Since this drive is where my MythTV recordings are kept, the recordings made were more-or-less useless because the hdd couldn't write the data to disk. Also, viewing older recording was bad because data wasn't coming off fast enough.

Jul 8 20:45:10 linux kernel: hdd: irq timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
Jul 8 20:45:10 linux kernel: hdd: status error: status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest }
Jul 8 20:45:10 linux kernel: hdd: drive not ready for command

So, in preparation to RMA the thing, I transferred all 260GB data off of it to another drive (which took like 15 hours).


Now, I plug the drive into a Windows machine, and run the SMART report (in SpeedFan) and it reports the same error. So then I ran the Full-test suite from the Seagate Tools CD and there was no problem (even though the test took 2h - is that normal for a 300GB drive?). I managed to transfer another 1.5GB off the drive, and it seemed to perform normally - no kernel errors reported either.

Should I bother to RMA it? It seems to work normally now, but I don't trust it. OTOH, I don't want to send it back to Seagate if all they're going to do it send it back to me and say there's no problem.

[Daijoubu]

If SMART report a problem, there's no doubt it will fail pretty soon
See if you can get cross shipping, I've heard Seagate doesn't do it...

[gman]

If SMART report a problem, there's no doubt it will fail pretty soon
See if you can get cross shipping, I've heard Seagate doesn't do it...

I think Seagate has advance RMA. That is they ship you the drive first and then you ship it back. It is better because you don't need to figure out how to package your drive to send it back. You just use whatever package they ship you first. You need a credit card to do advance RMA though.

[Daijoubu]

Yep, seems like they do it, you'll have to call them though
http://www.seagate.com/support/service/faq/index.html

[Groove]

what a wierd coincidence, i JUST got off the phone with Seagate RMA for the exact same reason- the drive was working just fine but SMART was reporting errors. With the past holiday weekend and stuff Seagate is wayyy backed up and even though they recieved (at least according to my tracking #) my drive almost 2 weeks ago it still hasn't been processed and still shows as not recieved by seagate.

odds are even if the drive isn't dying yet, it will soon. Your best bet is to RMA it, but unfortunately i dont think seagate does advance drive replacement in Canada.

I hope you dont have to wait as long as i have

[cipher]

Don't forget to get rid of all your pron before you send it in...

[kitty]

Anybody know for sure that they do or don't have advance RMA to Canada? That would be the awesome if they did.