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I just bought a brand new Seagate 1TB "Backup Plus" external USB 3.0 drive, and in running some diagnostics, HD Tune is showing a "calibration retry count" warning as shown in this screen grab.

screen grab

Every other test I've run on the drive seems to indicate that it's fine; a full error scan shows no damaged blocks, etc. I'm frankly a bit out of my depth here; is the HD Tune error something to be concerned about? Is it worth replacing the drive? I'm on a ThinkPad W520 Windows 7 64-bit.

Thanks for any feedback here.

Franck Dernoncourt
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nickpish
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1 Answers1

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If you have the possibility to simply return the drive/exchange it for a new one you should change it. Just in case.

The Error itself points to a mechanical problem of the drive. This could be a one time issue, but could get worse over time.

If the store you bought it from does not have a fair return policy, you could try to stress it a little bit to see if things get worse and than exchange it via warranty.

A nice program to test and stress the drive is http://hddscan.com/. With the reading mode you can check for bad sectors (bad sector are only detectable when reading a sector from the drive). With butterfly reads you can stress the drive mechanics. Butterfly reading is like: 1st sector, last sector, 2nd sector, last-1, 3rd, last-2, ... So the head has to move a lot.

masgo
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