Hi all,
I have a system composed of a 256GB Crucial M4 as the Windows boot drive, and 1TB WD black drive as the secondary/bulk storage drive. Recently, one of my SMART diagnostic tools (SpeedFan) has been reporting some pending sectors on the mechanical drive, so I decided to try running HDTune on it to see if the error scan routine could do a write on the bad sectors and force them to be reallocated, rather than going the more laborious route of cloning the WD to another drive, then zero-wiping or DBAN'ing it, then restoring.
Unfortunately, I just checked the results of the scan, and I realized with horror that I had the SSD selected instead of the mechanical drive (I thought it was running way too fast, but I was kind of in a hurry). So, can anyone tell me exactly what the HDTune scan does, and what consequences it will have for the SSD? I assume at a minimum it will decrease the lifetime of the flash by 1 write cycle (out of what, 3000 or so?). But what about TRIM? Will it mess up the garbage collection now that every sector on the drive is dirty? I have no idea if HDTune writes to the drive in such a way that allows Windows to TRIM the sector once HDTune is done with it, or if it bypasses the file system driver and writes at a lower level. Would just running something like SSD Tool be enough to fix it? Or am I going to need to image the drive, secure-erase it, and rewrite the boot image?
I have a system composed of a 256GB Crucial M4 as the Windows boot drive, and 1TB WD black drive as the secondary/bulk storage drive. Recently, one of my SMART diagnostic tools (SpeedFan) has been reporting some pending sectors on the mechanical drive, so I decided to try running HDTune on it to see if the error scan routine could do a write on the bad sectors and force them to be reallocated, rather than going the more laborious route of cloning the WD to another drive, then zero-wiping or DBAN'ing it, then restoring.
Unfortunately, I just checked the results of the scan, and I realized with horror that I had the SSD selected instead of the mechanical drive (I thought it was running way too fast, but I was kind of in a hurry). So, can anyone tell me exactly what the HDTune scan does, and what consequences it will have for the SSD? I assume at a minimum it will decrease the lifetime of the flash by 1 write cycle (out of what, 3000 or so?). But what about TRIM? Will it mess up the garbage collection now that every sector on the drive is dirty? I have no idea if HDTune writes to the drive in such a way that allows Windows to TRIM the sector once HDTune is done with it, or if it bypasses the file system driver and writes at a lower level. Would just running something like SSD Tool be enough to fix it? Or am I going to need to image the drive, secure-erase it, and rewrite the boot image?