ECC corrected = ?

Recently I installed a new harddisk (Seagate ST3120022A, 120GB) as a replacement for an ailing IBM Deskstar (60GB). I restored the contents of the IBM to the Seagate with True Image 8. Then I resized one partition (With Disk Director 9) to use the extra space. Everything worked fine, I thought.

Just to make sure of this I ran SpinRite 6 on the new hdd. More than a million ECC corrected showed up. When SpinRite was finished the number went up to 6,609,049 and 1,259,034 seek errors.

So I downloaded Seagate's Seatools (v. 3.02.03) and ran it on the Seagate. It passed all the physical diagnostics, the quick test and the full test. But, all three NTFS partitions failed with critical errors in the file system (One or more errors were found in the index). I checked the Seagate with SystemSuite's disk fixer and chkdsk and they found nothing. Then I ran SpinRite again and now the number of ECC corrected was 69,580,53 and seek errors was 1,330,282. Now the number is more than 80 million.

Needless to say I have a TI backup of the Seagate.

Since nobody seems to know how to interpret these ECC numbers I do not know what to do. Is the Seagate defective or did TrueImage cause these errors in the file system? So far no data loss or other problems.
My other two harddisks (A IBM Deskstar 40 GB and a Samsung 120 GB) do not show these huge ECC numbers. The Seagate is attached to a Promise Ultra ATA 100 TX2 controll card together with the Samsung.

Windows 2000 Pro SP4.

The safest action seems to replace the Seagate.

Anyone who has experiences here? Has this happened with True Image before?

Leif Lagerstedt

 

Hello lagerstedt,

Thank you for using Acronis software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

Could you please download Acronis Report utility and run it, create a report and send it to our technical support team?

Thank you.
--
Alexander Fedotov

 

Thank you for your answer. It may be that the reason for all the ECC corrected is not an True Image issue. It is probably a commercial compromise between speed and reliability. The SMART on the Seagate simply shows all the ECC and SpirRite simply reports them. The manufacturers have speeded up the harddisks and now need on the fly error correction to compensate for the speed. Not a very satisfactory solution. I have run some diagnostic programmes, including Seagate's own and they find no errors except a file system error that only occurs when you run the diagnostics from a boot CD, but never when Windows is running.

Anyone who knows more of this?

Leif Lagerstedt