I have 2 hard drives in a PC, both the same model.
HD Sentinel has started reporting "Lifetime writes" for one of the drives, but not the other.
(please see images attached)
Question 1:
Why has it started reporting this when it didn't before for this drive?
Question 2:
Why does it only show it for one drive and not the other one?
Lifetime writes on HDD
Lifetime writes on HDD
- Attachments
-
- Lifetime writes shown
- Lifetime writes.jpg (111.02 KiB) Viewed 3885 times
-
- Lifetime writes not shown
- No lifetime writes.jpg (112 KiB) Viewed 3885 times
-
hdsentinel
- Site Admin
- Posts: 3115
- Joined: 2008.07.27. 17:00
- Location: Hungary
- Contact:
Re: Lifetime writes on HDD
Generally the lifetime writes is more important on SSDs than hard disks. However, as some hard disks have internal counters to count/measure the total amount of written data, it is possible to show them too.
You can easily verify on the S.M.A.R.T. page: there is a 241 Total LBA Written attribute on your Seagate hard disk - which counts the amount of sectors (512 bytes) written.
There are some known Seagate hard disks and specific firmware versions which seems counting - but resets when the counter reaches 4294967295 sectors (approx. 2 TBytes).
Because of this, when the total amount of written data is SMALLER than this number, it is not yet displayed because it may be not valid.
And as soon as 2 TBytes or more data written (and Hard Disk Sentinel verified and confirmed that the value is surely real), the total amount of written data appears.
> Why has it started reporting this when it didn't before for this drive?
Because the drive reached 2 TBytes written data: 2.07 TB as you can see.
> Why does it only show it for one drive and not the other one?
Because the amount of written data is too small now. Both of your drives are very new and as soon as you use it for longer time (copy/move more data) the value will be displayed automatically.
You can easily verify on the S.M.A.R.T. page: there is a 241 Total LBA Written attribute on your Seagate hard disk - which counts the amount of sectors (512 bytes) written.
There are some known Seagate hard disks and specific firmware versions which seems counting - but resets when the counter reaches 4294967295 sectors (approx. 2 TBytes).
Because of this, when the total amount of written data is SMALLER than this number, it is not yet displayed because it may be not valid.
And as soon as 2 TBytes or more data written (and Hard Disk Sentinel verified and confirmed that the value is surely real), the total amount of written data appears.
> Why has it started reporting this when it didn't before for this drive?
Because the drive reached 2 TBytes written data: 2.07 TB as you can see.
> Why does it only show it for one drive and not the other one?
Because the amount of written data is too small now. Both of your drives are very new and as soon as you use it for longer time (copy/move more data) the value will be displayed automatically.
Re: Lifetime writes on HDD
Thank you for that detailed answer.