Replacing V drive

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11/17/2011 23:17 The 1TB drive (V:) I use for my photo, video and other content is showing up as having too many moved sectors. The disk monitoring system (SMART) has tagged it as being close to failing. I did some research as to what is really happening, and decided that the smart thing to do is replace it before it fails. To make this as easy as possible, I am copying all of the files to the M: drive, which is my multimedia backup drive. The Camera-buf directory is already there (M:\Camera_buf\) because of the idle time robocopy backup I have had set up for a long time. The remaining directories are:

• a1276837db1e9979ad8 (I don't remember what this is. Something to do with windows .net)
• Database-files (work in progress on my planned photo identification web site, early work on sql files and ER diagrams done with MySQL Workbench)
• DVD-images (images of family DVDs)
• Family Video Clips (work area for family video clips I have on the web)
• Kindle (backup of my Kindle from a couple of weeks ago when I had to get a new one)
• Movie Maker Work Area (currently empty)
• music (A few music files, including Stacey's recordings and rips of some of my CDs)
• Nikon (mostly Capture NX cache data)
• ohsu-xrays (X-rays from Andrea's back surgery)
• Packages (Files used by National Instruments LabView)
• Podcasts (Radio program podcasts)
• Web Site Files (A backup copy of my web site public_html directory plus the graphic files I have uploaded to my wiki and information about my robotics team's web site)

There is enough room on M:, so I am copying these to M:\rest_of_v\

Copy completed 23:55

This stuff is also backed up under CrashPlan, both locally on the X: drive and on the CrashPlan server, but making this copy will make bringing up a new drive easier.

Useful SMART tools

In my research on where this warning came from, I discovered that my internal hard drives are being managed by a system called Intel Rapid Storage Technology. This ties into the disk system technology S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology; often written as SMART.) The Intel tool does not say exactly what the error is, but I downloaded some stuff that gives me more information, and the result is that this drive has reallocated a lot of bad sectors. According to Wikipedia, quoting Google data, when this is flagged, the probability of a failure of the disk is multiplied by a factor of about 40. The downloaded tools that allowed me to find this out are smartmontools, which is a command line level tool set, at a GUI for it, gsmartcontrol. Using these, I was able to look at the actual flags in the SMART system.

Seagate RMA

Seagate requires some test results for a return. I ran SeaTools SMART test and got these results:

--------------- SeaTools for Windows v1.2.0.5 ---------------
11/18/2011 10:31:59 AM
Model: ST31000528AS
Serial Number: 6VPBM41Y
Firmware Revision: CC3E
Identify - Started 11/18/2011 10:31:59 AM
SMART - FAIL 11/18/2011 10:42:01 AM
SeaTools Test Code: AFA7A44A

The Seagate warranty expires in 2016, and the test code was accepted.

My RMA order number is 1004731452

Seagate should be shipping a replacement drive to arrive in a few days, and since the drive is not failing at the moment, it might be ok to wait for the replacement instead of buying a new one. It will depend on how much a new one costs, and it might be good to have a spare on hand anyway.

Replacement Drive

I replaced the drive with a 2TB drive and partitioned it to make a 1TB U: drive and a 1TB V: drive.