Reallocated Sector Count 4035! How to erase my files?

[rhysmo]

Hello everyone,

I've had my ReadyNAS duo up and running for a couple of months. One of the drives is now reporting regularly that it fails smart testing etc. and the reallocated sector count is 4035. This sounds very high from what I've read on here (one post I saw said 160 was max tolerated by Seagate!), so am keen to RMA with Seagate (It's an ST3500418AS). The count doesn't seem to be increasing much now though, it's been on 4035 for about a week now (drives are on about 8 hours a day).

I have run Seatools on the drive in a USB enclosure and the self tests fail, and it cannot read the smart data - I assume the drive is near defunct.

My main question is, what is the best way to delete my data from the drive before I send it back (it still appears to be working in the NAS drive)?

If I try to navigate to the drive whilst it's in the USB enclosure it says it's not formatted, I assume this is because it's a different file system to windows on there. I was going to use "ERASER" to zero out the drive - would a good way be to format the drive in windows then use such a program?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Regards,
Rhys.

[rhysmo]

Just posting to add it is a Barracuda 500GB 7200.12 - so I don't think it has the firmware issue I've seen discussed on here.

Also, this is the SMART data as seen in Frontview (but it failed in Seatools to read this data).

Code: Select all

Spin Up Time   0
Start Stop Count   179
Reallocated Sector Count   4035
Power On Hours   345
Spin Retry Count   0
Power Cycle Count   46
Temperature Celsius   28
Current Pending Sector   0
Offline Uncorrectable   0
UDMA CRC Error Count   0
Head Flying Hours   269277269590487
   
ATA Error Count   0

Extended Attribute
   
Hot-add events   0
Hot-remove events   0
Lp stat events   4
Power glitches   0
Hard disk resets   0
Retries   0
Repaired sectors   0


Just thought I'd add this out of interest really as I'm pretty convinced the drive is dying from what I've read so far...

[dbott67]

To effectively nuke a drive, you can use dban:

http://www.dban.org/

You'll need to install the drive into a SATA-capable PC.