Oh s--t, I just ran HDTune error scan on my SSD!

M

Metaluna

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 23, 2008
Messages
393
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?
 
Give it a day or so and then run AS-SSD on it. If the speeds are fine, then don't worry about it. I doubt it'll cause any problems.
 
Don't worry about it bro, think of it as it just did a virus scan, it just checks every sector to see what's going on.
 
From the HD Tune manual:

"This test only performs read operations and is nondestructive."

Since SSDs are limited only in the number of writes they can do, not the number of reads, you're in business.

That said, even if it had written to it all, I'd not worry about it.
 
Yeah, as far as I know HDTune will tell you there is a problem but won't do anything about it.
 
Ok thanks, I was under the impression that the "full" HDTune test did some kind of non-destructive read/write/read test that would force pending sectors to be reallocated, and the Quick test would do a read-only scan, but I could be mistaken (which would be a good thing in this case).

I wasn't all that worried about increased wear, I just wanted to make sure I didn't mess up the garbage collection algorithms in some wierd way that the drive can't recover from.

Anyway, I ran CDM on the SSD, and the performance still looks OK compared to an old run from a few months ago, but possibly down a few percentage points. I'll have to try Forceman's suggestion of AS-SSD as well.
 
Well I've never seen "red blocks" go away after several full scans, when they did in fact get "repaired" or reallocated by a full format.
 
You fucked it up, bro. You're gonna have to take the SSD out and burn it in thermite to fix it. :D
I keed.
 
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