Hardware ECC Recovered on Seagate HDD

[AllyM]

I replaced the hard drives in one of my PC recently with brand new 1TB Seagate Barracuda model ST1000DM010 drives but seem to be having problems with Windows 10 since installing these new drives. Looking at the SMART data, the drives are showing very poor values for parameter 195 "Hardware ECC Recovered"

Hardware ECC.jpg (286.99 KiB) Viewed 227 times

I have used several different models of Seagate HDDs in the past and always found them very reliable. I still have other PCs with older Seagate drives which report much better values for this parameter.
I just wondered what your thoughts were. Are these drives faulty? or is it just the way the latest Seagate drives behave in your experience?
The only other thing I notice is that most of the Seagate drives I've had in the past were manufactured in China, whereas these new two drives are manufactured in Thailand. So my next question is: Are the Chinese drives more reliable? or is this just a coincidence?

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for your message.

This is completely normal and expected. These numbers can fluctuate (increase/decrease highly) on a Seagate hard disk and these DO NOT indicate any problems/errors or so - as discussed several times on this forum.

Of course I can confirm that if there would be a real error, Hard Disk Sentinel would surely
- report in the text description
- show the degradation health value
- it would be detected by Disk -> Short self test or Disk -> Extended self test
- the Disk -> Surface test -> Read test could not be completed without problems

If you are interested, please check this forum topic:

https://www.hdsentinel.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=735&p=973#p973

[AllyM]

I understand that the values can fluctuate but on these drives they seem to always be around the worst possible as in image below:

Hardware ECC 1.jpg (110.92 KiB) Viewed 212 times

The PC will boot into Windows and appear to mostly work ok but at a random time can lock up, the screen will go blank, the PC will appear to have constant HDD activity for a short time, then screen will come back and PC will appear ok for a few minutes then this fault condition will repeat. The only way to break this cycle is to reboot the PC. this is only happening since swapping out the hard drives for these new ones. Like I said, I was just wondering in these particular ones were faulty or if all modern Seagate drives don't work properly, or if it is something to do with the Thailand manufactured ones?



I have other (older models and manufactured in China) Seagate drives which work great and have much better values for this SMART parameter as below:

Hardware ECC good HDD.jpg (106.1 KiB) Viewed 212 times

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for your attention.
Now I double checked and yes, it seems according some 100's of reports received about this model, the Value / Worst fields are always very low for the Hardware ECC Recovered attribute. In most cases both are 1 and in "best" situation these can be 2 or 5 (still not high).

So it seems the low numbers there are typical for this model.
This alone does not indicate problems: this attribute can never trigger error (as the Threshold is 0) but I agree that it's interesting.

However, other users did not report any similar (when the drive was 100% perfect) what you wrote. Personally I'd surely check cables, connections (just to be sure). From the list of attributes, I see no signs of cable/connection problems but I'd check just to be sure.
Also the driver of the controller (or the motherboard chipset) can cause some minor compatibility/timing issues, so I'd check that too and may update driver if possible.

If you use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option, I can also check the current driver and this may also give some ideas, thoughts.