Last week my external harddisk (Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB in a custom enclosure) showed signs of failure (Disk Utility SMART Pre-failure status - several bad sectors) and I decided to change it. I bought a new HDD (Seagate Barracuda 2TB) and connected it to my Ubuntu box with a SATA to USB cable that could not report SMART status. I copied all the contents of the old HDD to the new HDD (one partition with rsync, the other with parted cp) and then gently replaced the old HDD with the new one inside my aluminum enclosure.

For obscure reasons after reconnecting the new HDD through the old enclosure, the Linux box could not detect my partitions. I recovered the partitions with testdisk and restarted the computer. After the restart I checked the SMART status of the new HDD an I get this:

Read Error Rate
---------------
Normalized 108

Worst 99

Threshold 6

Value 16737944

I got a high value on the Seek Error Rate as well. Wondering why this happens I copied 2 GB directory from one partition to the other and rechecked the SMART status (5 minutes later). This time I got the following:

Read Error Rate
---------------
Normalized 109

Worst 99

Threshold 6

Value 24792504

As you see there has been an increase in the error rate. I am unable to interpret these numbers. Is my new hard disk already dying? What are the acceptable values in these fields for Seagate hard disks? Then why the assessment is still good?

While I could get temperature and airflow temperature data from my old HDD, I can not fetch them for the new one. I noticed that my old hdd had got really hot sometimes. Is it possible that the enclosure is killing the harddisks due to high temperature?...

Thanks