Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB

phrozen wrote:

mattkime wrote: I really don't see how its worth returning a drive with one reallocated sector. You could play that game for a while before getting a drive that stays at zero. Its just not an indication likely drive failure so stick with it. Is that a change because of the way modern drives work? On all the other hard drives I have owned, even a single reallocated sector was indication that it was going to soon completely fail. But, I understand the logic that there could be a single reallocated sector or even a few that doesn't indicate drive failure. Particularly as the size of the magnetic domains decreases (density increases), the possibility of a microscopic defect in the platter increases.... Hmm... Except there is already a ton of error correction before the level of reallocated sectors. eh, I don't really know....

Here's a very interesting Google study on the subject:

Google wrote:

Our results confirm the findings of previous smaller population studies that suggest that some of the SMART parameters are well-correlated with higher failure probabilities. We find, for example, that after their first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors. First errors in reallocations, offline reallocations, and probational counts are also strongly correlated to higher failure probabilities. Despite those strong correlations, we find that failure prediction models based on SMART parameters alone are likely to be severely limited in their prediction accuracy, given that a large fraction of our failed drives have shown no SMART error signals whatsoever. This result suggests that SMART models are more useful in predicting trends for large aggregate populations than for individual components. It also suggests that powerful predictive models need to make use of signals beyond those provided by SMART.

Here's the link for the entire paper: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf