I bought a new Seagate Exos 18T disk from Amazon, which came in a plain envelop without filling. I spotted dents on the outside disk (no surprise given no protection for this heavy metal piece during such a long journey from US to Australia, Amazon why?!) Anyway I became worried about bad sectors inside the disk so wanted to do some tests first.
It didn’t give me any comfort after running disk utilities such as gnome-disk-utility, smartctl, GSmartControl as they all reported a large number of “Seek_Error_Rate”, which also kept increasing(alarming)! After hours searching, came to this article that explained Seagate disks report this attribute in a different way than other hard disks(e.g. Western Digital). The article however doesn’t tell me how to read it.
Jumped to Seagate website but the only tool listed Seatools is Windows based, a dead end.
Finally I ended up with this Github repository https://github.com/Seagate/openSeaChest and its openSeaChest_SMART seemed exactly what I needed, bingo!
Downloaded its binary and run the following command
sudo ./openSeaChest_SMART -d /dev/sdx –smartAttributes analyzed
Now I can see the exact number of “read error” 🙂
Note this project is managed by Seagate, not sure why Seagate doesn’t list it on their website.