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I've just purchased a brand new Seagate ST31000524AS 1TB HDD. Manufacture date shows as January 2012 (yes that's as new as new can get), so must be one of the new batches from the post-flood Thailand. Anyway, I downloaded a copy of Active Hard Disk Monitor tool to check the S.M.A.R.T. parameters and I find the parameter Raw Read Error Rate is very low.

Should I be worried? Will this rectify over time? This hdd is just 7 hours old; what gives?

Edit: I meant high raw read error rate - Title updated accordingly

Very high Raw read error rate on brand new Seagate HDD

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    High density drive will always have read errors by the thousands, the firmware built into the drive has error correction (ECC) to remedy that, so as long as it is not a hard fault, this is a normal fact of life for high density platter drives. This is just the magic that goes on behind the scenes all the time on a high density drive, and when a user looks at this smart data it scares the hell out of them.
    – Moab
    Feb 24, 2012 at 17:01

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It seems it may be a count of the actual sectors read, the errors are in the upper 16bits of the 48bit word, please see

http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/Seagate_SER_RRER_HEC.html

Note: the original link is to a now-defunct Seagate Forums, but Wayback Machine shows it is also authored by fzabkar, whose personal page I now link to.

On my Seagate drives I have high decimal numbers, but when converted to hex I in fact have 0 errors in a whole lot of sectors read.

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    The link above appears to be broken now.
    – Mark Lopez
    Aug 30, 2018 at 18:26
  • Fixed broken link.
    – Colin
    Jan 5, 2021 at 5:19
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GSmartControl has a comment about this in the tooltip for the raw read error rate:

Note: Some drives (e.g. Seagate) are known to report very high Raw values for this attribute, and it's not an indication of a problem.

The smartmontools FAQ also state

What details can be interpreted from Raw read error rate?

If no documentation is available, the RAW value of attribute 1 is typically useless. The 48-bit field might encode several values, try -v 1,hex48 to check.

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