Hey, so I have brand new HDDs I intend to put in a btrfs software RAID. They’re Seagate ST4000VX016-3CV104 4TB Skyhawks. Workload is basically write and forget, I will probably never delete a thing.
However I decided to test them first and noticed that after writing about 160 GB, some SMART counters have gone up significantly. Read error rate went from 6.632 to 90.238.872 for example (seemingly all correct by hardware ECC), seek error rate from 143 to 87.661.
Am I reading things correctly? This does not seem like the way healthy drives should behave, does it? It similar on all of them tho. Are they just trash-tier drives they somehow got to work with ECC?
Seagate SMART values don’t mean what you think they mean
The SMART values that might be read out by third-party SMART software are not based on how the values may be used within the Seagate hard drives. Seagate does not provide support for software programs that claim to read individual SMART attributes and thresholds. There may be some historical correctness on older drives, but new drives, no doubt, will have incorporated newer solutions, attributes and thresholds.
Seagate uses the general SMART Status, pass or fail. The individual attributes and threshold values are proprietary and we do not offer a utility that will read out the values. If the values that you are seeing with a third party SMART utility are not displaying properly or seem to be false, please contact your software vendor for further explanation of the values.
Some third-party SMART software programs display a list of attributes that seem to announce or foreshadow a SATA hard drive failure. Some of the most common are:
Raw Read Error Rate Raw_Read_Error_Rate Reallocated Sector Count Reallocated_Sector_Count Reallocation Count Reallocation_Count Seek Error Rate Seek_Error_Rate Spin Retry Count Spin_Retry_Count Hardware ECC Recovered Hardware_ECC_Recovered Current Pending Sector Current_Pending_Sector Ultra DMA CRC Error Count Ultra_DMA_CRC_Error_Count Ultra ATA CRC Error Count Ultra_ATA_CRC_Error_Count Offline Uncorrectable Sector Count Offline_Uncorrectable_Sector_Count ECC hardware errors recovered ECC_hardware_errors_recovered Current_Pending_Sector Offline_Uncorrectable ECC Seek Error Pre-Failure: Imminent loss of data is being predictedPlease remember that these third-party programs do not have proprietary access to Seagate hard disk information, and therefore often provide inconsistent and inaccurate results. SeaTools is more consistent and more accurate and is the standard Seagate uses to determine hard drive failure.
Very insightful, thank you! And very shitty behaviour by Seagate. Proprietary and undocumented device status, amazing.
You should look up what those values even mean. Not all values that HDDs expose via SMART are related to actual critical errors or even properly interpreted by your tools.
Seek and read error rates are always high and grow quickly on Seagate drives. I don’t know what part isn’t doing its job properly but high values here don’t mean anything of significance.
On all drives? I’d check your controller and cables.
