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bishopazrael · Jan 4, 2009, 12:59 PM

Hey all. I just bought a new unibody macbook pro 15. I had a samsung 500gb drive, so I installed the drive. It spins up, works, hell, I'm using it RIGHT NOW. ONLY problem with it is that in disk utility its telling me that the smart status is going to fail. It's important to know that I had this hdd in a macbook c2d and disk utility never once gave me an issue with it. It's only once I put it in my new mbp that the smart status says failing. Why would my macbook see it as a perfectly fine drive yet my new mbp doesn't? I also hooked it up via a macally usb/firewire drive cage and hooked it up to a brand new mac mini and did EVERYTHING to it.

Wiped the old partitions
formatted it.
checked the disk.
Everything came back ok.

Is it really failing?

Is this a known issue?

Aside from RMA'ing the hard drive I know I have to buy a new drive...

Any thoughts?

seanc · Jan 4, 2009, 01:12 PM

I wouldn't trust it - usually if SMART says it's failing - it's failing.

Have you got a desktop PC you can borrow? Hook it up internally and enable SATA in the BIOS, does it moan at startup?
Once in Windows, download and install Speed Fan, what are the status of the bars down the bottom? Do an online analysis and link it here.

bishopazrael · Jan 4, 2009, 01:39 PM

Well I don't have a pc unfortunately. What kills me is that if I put it in my macbook it'll show up as fine. Could it be some kind of incompatibility between the drive and my mbp?

seanc · Jan 4, 2009, 01:48 PM

It could well be an incompatibility - we could tell if we could get the actual SMART values from the HDD.

I take it you don't have Windows installed on the MacBook...

No one else on New Egg mentions issues with it and their Unibody MacBooks (couple of reviews)http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...ords=(keywords)

bishopazrael · Jan 4, 2009, 01:50 PM

yeah.. shite. I think I'm just going to order another hdd and see how that works. I can RMA this one later with samsung but I need to make sure my mbp is up and running. I've got a ton of other stuff to do, but at some point I may well just load up xp on here and see what happens. Is there nothing on the mac side I can use to do this?

seanc · Jan 4, 2009, 01:59 PM

Look into a Seagate - nice 5 year warranties.
Western Digital are doing 500GB 2.5" drives as well.

This article mentions using smartmontools and smartctl to get the SMART values http://www.rocketcat.info/blog/2006/...-mac-os-x.html
You could give that a try.

bishopazrael · Jan 4, 2009, 02:03 PM

I just added the seagate to my newegg cart. Throwing in a few other things but it'll be solved. Sean thanks for helping me on a Sunday morning. I'll give the links a look see in a bit.

mduell · Jan 4, 2009, 04:48 PM

What are the actual S.M.A.R.T. parameter values, both current and worst, as viewed by each the MacBook and the MacBook Pro?

tooki · Jan 4, 2009, 11:08 PM

Originally Posted by seanc

Look into a Seagate - nice 5 year warranties.

Not any more! They're back to 3 years for most products.

bishopazrael · Jan 5, 2009, 02:03 AM

It reads fine in the macbook. Or it did 5 days ago when it left. That's one of the things I did before moving was to do a disk utilites repair of the drive & the permissions and such. Dropped it in here and it's gone wonky. Can I just pull my drive from the mbp and plug it into the macbook and boot up and see what it says?

Matter of fact... if you guys think I can do that.. just post and I'll do it. I just don't want to have to go through another 2 hour import of data .... ya know?

mduell · 03:24 AM

If your OS is up to date you should be able to move it between a MB and MBP without any issues. You should grab the S.M.A.R.T. parameter values from the MBP before you move it.

Originally Posted by tooki

Not any more! They're back to 3 years for most products.

Only for OEM, non-enterprise internal drives. The Seagate retail desktop (Barracuda) and laptop (Momentus) hard drives are still 5 years.

tooki · Jan 5, 2009, 04:47 AM

Yeah, but most online vendors are selling only the OEM versions.

bishopazrael · Jan 5, 2009, 12:16 PM

where do I get the parameters from?

mduell · Jan 5, 2009, 02:31 PM

SMART Reporter or a similar tool can dump them out to text.

seanc · Jan 5, 2009, 03:17 PM

Care to share how you get SMART Reporter to dump them?

bishopazrael · Jan 5, 2009, 04:16 PM

thats what I want to know

kylef · Jan 5, 2009, 04:22 PM

SMART saved me once. A Western Digital drive I had (in RAID 0, nuisance) alerted me that it was going to fail. I booted up, backed up all my files from the RAID 0 system and the next time I rebooted the drive failed (and subsequently both disks lost their data). I'd trust it over not trusting it.

mduell · Jan 5, 2009, 08:54 PM

Huh, I thought SMART Reporter was more useful.

Looks like you can get them with smartmontools. Or one of the many GUI apps for Windows if you have Windows installed.

Simon · Jan 6, 2009, 02:40 AM

Originally Posted by tooki

Not any more! They're back to 3 years for most products.

Sorry but IMHO that's nonsense. I checked two of my regular dealers plus Newegg. All the Barracudas and 2.5" HDDs they had come with 5 year warranties. The 320 GB Momentus 7200.3 I just ordered comes with a five year warranty as well.

Most Seagate disks an average Mac user would buy still come with a 5 year warranty.

mduell · Jan 6, 2009, 04:45 PM

Originally Posted by Simon

Sorry but IMHO that's nonsense. I checked two of my regular dealers plus Newegg. All the Barracudas and 2.5" HDDs they had come with 5 year warranties. The 320 GB Momentus 7200.3 I just ordered comes with a five year warranty as well.

All of Newegg's Seagate laptop drives are the OEM/bare drive product, which have a 3 year warranty for drives sold after 3 January 2009.

The retail products still have 5 year warranties.

Simon · Jan 7, 2009, 04:12 AM

These are Newegg's Seagate notebook drives. Even though some are OEM (not all!) Seagate advertises them with a 5 year warranty.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...5&name=Seagate

If the page you link to is correct Newegg needs to update their web page ASAP.

mduell · Jan 7, 2009, 03:58 PM

I emailed Newegg about it on Monday but only got an automated reply.

Simon · Jan 7, 2009, 05:00 PM

Well as long as they advertise it that way they will have to honor the 5 year warranty. Good for buyers. Bad for Newegg. Their call.

mduell · Jan 7, 2009, 06:37 PM

Originally Posted by Simon

Well as long as they advertise it that way they will have to honor the 5 year warranty. Good for buyers. Bad for Newegg. Their call.

The warranty time periods are in the "Manufacturer Warranty" section of the description; Newegg only covers the drive for replacement/refund for 30 days. If your drive fails after 4 years, Newegg isn't going to help you when Seagate says you're not covered.

Simon · Jan 8, 2009, 03:31 AM

If they advertise it that way, they can be held responsible.

bishopazrael · Jan 8, 2009, 08:11 PM

well 5 or 3 year warranty... no big deal. Just got the seagate installed.

I want to be clear. I'm a data whore. I had around 250 gigs worth of data on my old drive. I installed the new seagate, installed a fresh copy of leo and did the registration. Soon as a I got the desktop, I fired up migration assistant and transferred data. It took under an hour to do it.

I don't know if it's me... or what... but as a tech I find that speed AMAZING. the other drive was just completely garbage compared to this. So I guess it was a bad drive. I'm just glad its over with now so I can focus on work. A huge thanks to everyone who's been here to help me through the years.

Rock on
Bishop

Simon · Jan 9, 2009, 04:05 AM

So which Seagate did you get?

I recently bought a Momentus 7200.3 (320 GB, 7200 rpm, 16 MB) and also found it to be surprisingly fast. It's very quiet and it's cool. I'm starting to really like these 2.5" Seagate drives.

bishopazrael · Jan 9, 2009, 10:24 AM

I got the 500gb 5400rpm drive. It's been great so far. My ONLY qualm with it is that its 5400 instead of 7200, but other than that it's been great. I'll be waiting for them to make it in a faster flavor, then I'll snap that up as well.

Simon · Jan 9, 2009, 11:39 AM

How much data do you have on it? If you're above 250 GB, chances are the 5400 rpm 500 GB will be faster than a 320GB 7200 rpm disk.