Failure Predicted

[marlzleh]

Hi,

I’m getting the following error for one of my hard drives via email, when I check hdsentinel in the morning the disk is perfectly fine:

Failure Predicted - Attribute: 5 Reallocated Sectors Count, Count of sectors moved to the spare area. Indicate problem with the disk surface or the read/write heads.
Failure Predicted - Attribute: 197 Current Pending Sector Count, Count of unstable sectors. These pending sectors may be remapped to the spare area.
Replace hard disk immediately.

Sending test report to developer shortly.

[hdsentinel]

Hi,

Thanks for your message and the developer report.

I double checked the developer report and as I see everything is correct, so the drive is (really) perfect.

What I can imagine is a problem with the SATA chipset driver which manages the disk drive: in very rare cases, the chipset driver can provide incorrect values - which may trigger a such false alert.
Very rarely - but if we have constant monitoring, then sometimes it can happen. Sometimes may happen during a major driver update / Windows update.

Hard Disk Sentinel has filters against similar (as it is known situation) but sometimes the chipset can still provide incorrect details. I'll examine and improve the filtering to prevent / minimize the issue.

If possible (especially if you may see similar again), I'd consider to update to the latest possible chipset driver for the motherboard, as it may make things better.

Do you have the original alert e-mail? If you can forward to info (at) hdsentinel (dot) com, it is possible to check and verify / compare with the developer report too. This would help adjusting the above mentioned filter too.

[marlzleh]

Hi,
Thankyou for your fast response.
I've forwarded the original email report.
I'll try updating my chipset driver. Hopefully that helps.
This only seems to happen once ever few months.

If a drive was failing would it normally throw this error report and not go back to 100% Health like it is in my case?

Thanks again!

[hdsentinel]

> If a drive was failing would it normally throw this error report and not go back to 100% Health like it is in my case?

Yes, as you wrote: if the drive is *really* failing, then the Health does not go back to 100% again.

If the Health drops for a short period and then improves back then there is good chance that something else may cause similar false alarm.
In the years, personally I encountered with some SATA controllers, BIOS bugs, chipset drivers, USB adapters/docks/converters and so (and sometimes in a combination with some specific drive manufacturer / model / model family / firmware version too).
There are lots of filters in Hard Disk Sentinel to avoid it and constantly added more filters to prevent similar.