Hey, so I have brand new HDDs I intend to put in a btrfs software RAID. They’re Seagate ST4000VX016-3CV104 4TB Skyhawks. Workload is basically write and forget, I will probably never delete a thing.
However I decided to test them first and noticed that after writing about 160 GB, some SMART counters have gone up significantly. Read error rate went from 6.632 to 90.238.872 for example (seemingly all correct by hardware ECC), seek error rate from 143 to 87.661.
Am I reading things correctly? This does not seem like the way healthy drives should behave, does it? It similar on all of them tho. Are they just trash-tier drives they somehow got to work with ECC?
You should look up what those values even mean. Not all values that HDDs expose via SMART are related to actual critical errors or even properly interpreted by your tools.
Seek and read error rates are always high and grow quickly on Seagate drives. I don’t know what part isn’t doing its job properly but high values here don’t mean anything of significance.