[ale] Palimpsest Disk Utility

[Scott Castaline]

Does anyone know whether this utility is accurate? I had just before 
doing a fresh install bought 2 Seagate 500GB SATA II HDDs. I used one to 
back up my old volumes and the other has my music files. Just the other 
day I suddenly got a warning that one of my disk drives were failing. 
When I opened up the message it launched the above mentioned utility 
with the offending drive high lighted. It said that I had 8 bad sectors 
that had been reallocated. I reran the test and it was fine after that. 
Today while the updates were being updated the error occurred again, 
this time it reported 11 sectors were bad on the same drive. The drive 
is the other brand new drive. My 2 year old Western Digital 500GB and I 
also have a 1 yr old Seagate 500GB that are both ok. I noticed that the 
new drives were half the height of the older drives, so I assume that it 
has 500GB on a single platter, unless if the Chinese are able to make 
the heads and platters thin enough to hold 2 platters and the required 
amount of heads, better than they were in Singapore.

So actually I have 2 questions from my long dissertation; 1. Is this 
utility accurate? 2. Has anyone have any negative experiences with these 
newer 500GB drives from Seagate (ST3500410AS)?

TIA
Scott