Hard Disk Monitoring

Hello.

I installed HD Sentinel and what was my suprise when I found this:





Is this report accurate? I mean the threshold for realocated sectors is 36, and current value is 93, way over the threshold value. Can anybody tell me what is the reason for the 22% of the health of the drive, as this is the only area that shows any warning?

cheers
Lucas

Hello Lucas,

Thanks for your question. I'm afraid, yes, it is accurate: shows the actual number of disk problems.

The problem is that if we examine strictly the "value" and "threshold" fields, we never get proper information about the actual number of problems, the real number of errors reported by the drive.

More important, that to reach this threshold (when the health would be 0% and you can ask for warranty replacement) there would be much more problems required. Most hard disks never reach this threshold and fail much sooner.
Especially because when the drive has hundreds of reallocated sectors, there are more and more chance for further degradations, big(ger) surface area problems and so.

Relatively low number of such problems is completely acceptable - but 100's of such reallocated sectors are sign of possible disk failure.

It would be nice to check the following sections to verify if the drive is now stable as it is possible that there are further problems with the surface (for example on different, infrequently accessed areas and/or sectors near the current problematic ones).

http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#health
http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#tests

Also you may get further information about the situation if you click on "?" next to the text description or at http://www.hdsentinel.com/smart

I see.

Thanks for quick answer!

hdsentinel wrote:Hello Lucas,

Thanks for your question. I'm afraid, yes, it is accurate: shows the actual number of disk problems.

The problem is that if we examine strictly the "value" and "threshold" fields, we never get proper information about the actual number of problems, the real number of errors reported by the drive.

More important, that to reach this threshold (when the health would be 0% and you can ask for warranty replacement) there would be much more problems required. Most hard disks never reach this threshold and fail much sooner.
Especially because when the drive has hundreds of reallocated sectors, there are more and more chance for further degradations, big(ger) surface area problems and so.

Relatively low number of such problems is completely acceptable - but 100's of such reallocated sectors are sign of possible disk failure.

It would be nice to check the following sections to verify if the drive is now stable as it is possible that there are further problems with the surface (for example on different, infrequently accessed areas and/or sectors near the current problematic ones).

http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#health
http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#tests

Also you may get further information about the situation if you click on "?" next to the text description or at http://www.hdsentinel.com/smart

Seems you were right.

Couple days later and now it shows me this:


This sudden drop in the health of the drive is not a good sign is it? :/

I see.
Really sorry for that, yes, somehow it was expected that further problems will be reported and health will decrease more and more.
I completely agree: it is absolutely not a good sign

soyo wrote:Seems you were right.

Couple days later and now it shows me this:


This sudden drop in the health of the drive is not a good sign is it? :/

hdsentinel wrote:I see.
Really sorry for that, yes, somehow it was expected that further problems will be reported and health will decrease more and more.
I completely agree: it is absolutely not a good sign

There's a big positive though from all this Your calculations of the health were correct and they were indeed accuratly showing the state of the hard drive. I thought it's strange that only one area is critical yet the health value was so low, but it seems the time showed this health value was totaly justified, so congrats! Great software.

Lucas