HD Sentinal repaorting bad sectors

G

glen

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 30, 2007
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When I open the Hard Disc Sentinel program on of my harddrives is at 43% health with 60 bad sectors.

Yet I ran the full surface scan and no bad sectors were found.

This HDD contains valuable info which is backed up on another drive but should I replace it?
 
Run the diagnostic tool from Samsung itself - that's the only one I'd put any faith in. For whatever brand you have, always use the manufacturer's diagnostic for their own hard drives - the rest aren't going to be anywhere near as thorough or accurate in terms of results.

And for the love of Pete, don't ever trust what S.M.A.R.T. results say - I've had drives that were 100% clean on S.M.A.R.T. status but the manufacturer's own diagnostic tool coughed up errors and then I've had drives where S.M.A.R.T. just wouldn't shut up (figuratively speaking) about a variety of problems with a given drive only to find out they were all false alarms.

After years of watching how effectively useless S.M.A.R.T. tends to be (personal opinion here from decades of experience with these things, not just S.M.A.R.T. which is still relatively new in the history of hard drives), I just decided that the only really worthy diagnostic is the one by the company that makes the drive.

If you can't track down one specifically from the manufacturer (should be rare if it happens), use the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test which is coded to work with pretty much any hard drive out there and offer pretty solid results.

Good luck...
 
60 bad sectors means you have 60 bad sectors. Full surface scan found no *additional* bad sectors beyond the 60 that were already remapped to spare blocks.

Yes you should replace it.
 
odditory said:
60 bad sectors means you have 60 bad sectors. Full surface scan found no *additional* bad sectors beyond the 60 that were already remapped to spare blocks.

Yes you should replace it.
Click to expand...

Just ordered a new drive, searching the internet it appears there were many issues with the 1.5tb Seagate I own, not taking chances.

Thanks
 
If you use Samsung's diagnostic, be sure it's EStools version 3.01v, not 3.01p, which wrongly reports errors on drives bigger than 1GB or that have 4KB sectors (I'm not sure which causes problems for it). download links.
 
I would take a look at the SMART data with a program like CrystalDiskInfo. And also from my experience at work manufacturer utilities tend to not be that rigorous at testing drives. This is my experience for WD and Seagate drives. I have seen these say drives that had serious problems were perfectly fine. The good thing is these are not necessary. The drive itself will tell you if it is having problems. That is if you know what to look for. So testing software really can be any software that gets the drive to read and/or write across the entire disk. Then look and see if the SMART data is changing. One such program is badblocks. You can do a non destructive read/write test across the entire drive or if you do not care about the data a destructive test will be much faster. Either way checking the result of the SMART should give you a sense of the drives health.

Remember the SMART data contains a table that records how many sectors that the drive was having difficulty reading so after the last successful read it reallocated the sectors with ones from the spare pool. It also records the ones that could not be read the last try. It also records CRC errors that indicate a cabling problem..
 
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