curiousity question HDSentinel Pro portable

[Nacman]

Just bought the software to run 4 8TB drives through initial testing. All four drives are identical. All four drives have the same software on them from manufacturer. These have never been mounted in any system of mine.

Looking at the pic, the upper right square display “green” block test area is different that the other three. Some blocks are darker green, some lighter green.

The test being performed is a destructive write then read. It is in the read portion of the test now.

Why the difference in the one screen, anyone know?

[hdsentinel]

Please see the Help which clearly, with BOLD shows the answer (and also numerous times discussed in this forum):

Darker green color means that the sectors are slower and harder to process (read or write depending on the test type) but they are still good.

( https://www.hdsentinel.com/help/en/61_surfacetest.html )

Some such darker blocks are completely normal, but if they form continuous larger areas (near yellow / red blocks), they may likely fail.
This is also described on the above mentioned page with examples.

[Nacman]

That is interesting enough. However if they are “slower” to process why did the test on the drive that displayed about 30% of these block dark green and contiguous, take 2.5 hours LESS time to process than the other 3 which were all being tested at the same time?Seems counter intuitive to me if it takes longer to process them to confirm they are “good”, why then finish testing first?

Also, sometimes a customer buys a product because they need to use the abilities to offered by said product immediately and don’t spend the time reading through the threads to discover that the question may have been answered already. I think that comes with the fact that I paid for the software and didn’t download a hacked copy.

Have a nice day.

-Nac

[hdsentinel]

Generally when the test started, Hard Disk Sentinel determines the performance of the drive and then compare the performance of the following blocks with the already processed ones.

When multiple tests started, it is possible that the total bandwidth of the controller is divided between the drives - so the first drive starts faster - then the test became slightly slower. This could happen now. The test on other drives may already started at slightly slower speed - so this performance-comparison does not reveal significant performance change.
You can check the details if you select the "Temperature and transfer speed" tab in the test window (or right click on the disk surface map (the small boxes) and export the transfer speed values.

This is not rare when multiple tests started and the drives connected to same disk controller (motherboard chipset).
Even more common with hardware RAID controllers where cache modules may improve the performance on the beginning of a test - then the speed can drop significantly.


I completely 100% agree you, sorry for pointing on the answer.
Just sometimes (not this case companies/developers may not able to answer as soon as happened now - and it may be faster to search for a word "darker" which would immediately give the answer.

[Nacman]

Thanks for your detailed explanation. I decided after all four drives finished testing, to perform another test on the one drive that had the darker green blocks. The retest, was much faster as you stated, because I was not sharing the bandwidth of the USB bus. However, all the blocks where light green this time, so that drive is perfect too.

-Nac