Hello Ravenchant,
Thanks for your message and the information, pictures about the situation.
Yes, this is true: the "Value" field does not seem to change.
This means that even if the hard disk already started to develop bad sectors, if we'd only see the "Value", we may think that the hard disk is perfect. This would give false assumption about the disk status.
This is why years ago people started to feel S.M.A.R.T. is not reliable to determine and report the actual, real health status, because such Value field may
- not change, not decrease with problems at all
- not show / reflect new problems, degradations
This is described at
www.hdsentinel.com/smart page, which describes why checking the Value / Threshold pairs is simply not a good solution when we are interested in real hard disk problems, want to be notified about even minor problems and want to be alerted about degradations.
This shows that in many cases the "Value" field is simply not effective, it does not indicate problems - even on drives already failed and sent to data recovery companies.
Yes, generally, the "Value" field should decrease when new and new problems reported. The problem is that they may require even MORE problems to decrease and really high number of problems to drop below the "Threshold", to reach the error-threshold set by the manufacturer (when the reported health would be 0% in Hard Disk Sentinel).
Usually hard disks fail long before they'd indicate failure with the "Value" field.
The most important is to know that the "bad sectors" reported in the text description are no longer used by the hard disk: they are already fixed (reallocated).
It means that they can't be read/write in the future, a special (reserved) spare area is used for all reads and writes targeting those bad sectors.
This means that in an ideal world, there should be no problems with the drive: the drive itself reallocated some sectors and now all sectors (the original good sectors plus the ones from the spare area) are fully usable.
This is not as rare as we may think. Manufacturers (exactly because of the above) allow some bad sectors - and there are no big problems until their number is relatively lower and the status of the drive is stable.
Please check:
http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#health
and
http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#tests
and
http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq_repair_ha ... _drive.php
for more information about this situation: how to reveal and fix possible problems, to determine if the drive status is stable, really all bad sectors fixed by reallocation and now, the disk surface (when the original bad sectors are no longer read/written) can be used.
And if so, the error-counters can be reset in Hard Disk Sentinel to acknowledge these problems and increase the health, so then the software will report only possible further problems.
