Hard Disk Monitoring

Windows had put the paging file on my D drive for some reason, a 8TB drive I used for media files. Suddenly I noticed my PC would crawl to a halt and memory would shoot up to 99% usage. So often I would have to turn the PC off when this happened, as I couldn't access my PC, only resetting would help. I then noticed my HDD had shot down to 12% health, then 4%. I moved everything off on to other drives, and tried to full format to clean the errors, I found I couldn't as it kept saying the drive was in use, so I eventually discovered it was being used for the pagefile. So I changed that. I then went to format fully and found it would stick at 90%, so I then used HDD Sentinel for a full read/write disk repair destructive test, this lasted 3 days as it fixed multiple sectors that were around 90% to 100% on the drive (so the lowest 5 lines of blocks, approx 8 blocks were bad).

This seemed to fix it, as I then ran a full format and it worked fine, but I noticed the health only went up to 9%, so I ran a short test and that was fine, ran an extended test and that was fine no errors. I then ran the "re-initialise disk surface" test which lasted 76 hours, but this was fine, every block was green. But still the health is 9%. Any ideas ?

See below for how all tests have now passed. I didn't take a screen grab of the very first test with the errors, but I remember it saying at the end that all errors were repaired, which seems to be true given how blocks are all green now. So can I now use it safely ?

Please see attached images.

Yes, if you're lucky, then this can happen. Moreover, this WOULD be expected behaviour: generally the spare area of the disks designed exactly for this situation: when a bad sector found, the disk drive should replace it by a sector from the spare area.
So IDEALLY yes, if we perform tests, all possible issues are revealed and fixed - and then (as all further reads/writes targeting the original bad sector are redirected to the spare area) then we should see no more problems.

But this rarely happens - and in most cases hard disks produce newer and newer problems, data corruption/data loss, especially when there are so high number of bad sectors already detected. Personally I'd expect same: newer issues with time and normal usage.

Yes, the disk tests generally designed to improve the situation: improve the usability, stabiliy of the disk drive. By that, the health may increase as well, but of course the tests do not cause HIGH increase alone.

If you are sure (confirmed by the tests) that the disk status is stable, you can any time manually clear the error counters: then (as the problems are stabilized, fixed) Hard Disk Sentinel will no longer report them - just shows possible newer issues, degradations.

This is described exactly at Support -> Frequently Asked Questions -> How to repair hard disk drive? How to eliminate displayed hard disk problems?
( https://www.hdsentinel.com/faq_repair_h ... _drive.php )
If you are interested about how to restore the hard disk health (how to restore HDD health to 100%) please check that page.


Also there are several similar situations covered in different topics, for example:

https://www.hdsentinel.com/forum/viewto ... 67&p=16375

and

https://www.hdsentinel.com/forum/viewto ... 15&p=17339

Thanks. I am a bit confused though, as my data field says "4C28", what would I change the offset to ? As there is a letter C in there and not just numbers.

You would need to specify

-19496

(the number of errors displayed in the text description with negative sign).

The 4C28 is the hexadecimal format of this number. If you right click on the S.M.A.R.T. page, you can select the "Decimal data fields" option to display all values in decimal, so then you'll see the number 19496 there (instead of the 00004C28).